Effectiveness of a community-driven, asthma intervention: project asthma in-home response

Abstract

Objectives: Project Asthma In-home Response (AIR) is a multilevel, home-based intervention to address childhood asthma. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of the community-driven, multilevel Project AIR intervention. We hypothesize that children participating in the Project AIR intervention will have reduced asthma-related emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and asthma exacerbations. Methods: Seventy-Five participants of an in-home asthma intervention were surveyed at the onset of intervention and six months after the intervention. Results: The mean age of clients in the sample population was ten years. Most clients in the sample population were 11–15 years old (34.7%), followed by 6–10 years old (29.3%) and 3–5 years (26.0%). Participation in the Project AIR intervention resulted in significant reductions in asthma attacks (p-value 0.0003), asthma-related emergency room visits (p-value > 0.0001), and asthma-related hospitalizations (p-value 0.008).Conclusion: The results of this study support that in-home environmental asthma programs are an efficient method of treating asthma in a smaller metro area. Our findings reinforce prior studies in larger metropolitan areas such as New York and Boston.

Keywords:

• children
• pediatric
• asthma
• community
• asthma morbidity
• healthy homes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Healthy Housing Omaha for their contributions to this research project. They were awarded the 2019 National Environmental Leadership Award in Asthma Management. This award is the nation’s highest honor for programs helping people bring asthma under control. More specifically, this award is the EPA’s highest recognition a program can receive for delivering excellent environmental asthma management as part of their comprehensive asthma care services. In particular, their staff members, Ian Sheets and Shannon Melton, were instrumental in providing the raw data for this paper. We would also like to express our appreciation for statistical analysis, data review, advice, and input from the University of Nebraska’s College of Public Health’s Elizabeth Lyden and Dr. Hyo Jung Tak.

Disclosure statement

Authors would like to declare that they have no competing or conflicts of interest.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.