Using community priorities and misconceptions about asthma as a vessel for community-led education among Hispanics

Abstract

Objectives

In New York City, asthma prevalence is greater in Hispanics than non-Hispanics for both children (10.9% vs. 7.4%) and adults (9.0% vs. 6.3%). Disparities in asthma management among Hispanics are found to arise, in part, from a limited education about asthma. Using elements of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), we worked with the community to identify asthma priorities and misconceptions among Hispanics and used that information to develop a tailored asthma educational tool—the Asthma Training Modules (ATMs).

Methods

Over the past 3 years (2016, 2017, and 2018), we conducted educational asthma workshops to collect and analyze information to develop the ATMs and a summary of the ATMs in an Asthma Educational Card (AEC). We trained 6 Asthma-Community-Leaders using the ATMs, who assembled community members for teaching sessions using the AEC. Participants completed a pre-and-post asthma knowledge questionnaire.

Results

We identified asthma priorities and misconceptions themed on: culturally relevant resources for Hispanics, symptom and trigger recognition, and treatments. A total of 104 participants attended the teaching sessions led by Asthma-Community-Leaders and participants’ mean knowledge score increased from 64% pre-teaching to 85% post-teaching, (p < 0.01).

Conclusion

Our community-led education, which included a tailored asthma educational tool and trained Asthma-Community-Leaders, successfully improved asthma knowledge among Hispanics. Further studies are warranted to determine whether these results are reproducible among a larger cohort and what the comparative effectiveness of our intervention as compared to other education-based interventions.

Keywords:

• Education
• Social Determinants of Health (SDH)
• Hispanics/latino
• disparities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of community stakeholders and collaborators including Miguel Molineros, Clara Londoño, Reyzury Jackson, Juan C. Gomez, Carmen Melendez, and Angel Munoz.

Declaration of interest

All authors have no financial conflicts of interest to disclose.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this study was provided by The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Pipeline to Proposal Project and 5095049–015 Jacome (PI), and the CHEST Foundation Community Service Grant, Hajizadeh (PI). The statements presented in this article are solely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute® (PCORI®), its Board of Governors or Methodology Committee.