New initiatives aim to reduce racial and ethnic asthma disparities and improve outcomes for groups including Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans

The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA) is spearheading yet another new venture geared toward improving health outcomes for our nation’s most at-risk groups affected by asthma. These groups include Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans, senior adults, expectant mothers, children with asthma, and our nation’s military who have developed asthma while in service.

The project, Community Health Interventions to Advance Self-Management of Asthma (CHI-ASMA), is backed with the help of new grant funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via a five-year $1 million grant. The aim of CHI-ASMA is to empower patients and their families to improve asthma control, which will reduce morbidity and mortality due to asthma.

CHI-ASMA will work to improve community health with the following programs and initiatives:

• Promoting updated recommendations from the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program Coordinating Committee (NAEPPCC) Expert Panel Report 4 (EPR-4) to clinicians, patients, and caregivers
• Promoting guidelines-based asthma care for military service members
• Partnering with and empowering community health workers (CHWs), patients and caregivers to evaluate home environments for asthma triggers
• Launching three national awareness campaigns focusing on (1) communicable respiratory illnesses and their impact on asthma; (2) asthma inhaler usage and achieving symptom control; (3) pediatric allergic asthma
  
  

AAFA is kicking off the project with a targeted respiratory illness awareness campaign covering COVID-19, influenza, and pneumococcal pneumonia through its online patient community, digital media platforms, and ongoing pursuit of strategic partnerships.

CHI-ASMA aligns with AAFA’s top priority to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the unequal impact of asthma and allergies on the most underserved communities in the United States. This includes Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans who experience the largest asthma disparities in rates, treatment, and outcomes closely detailed in AAFA’s newly released report Asthma Disparities in America: A Roadmap to Reducing Burden on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. The report moves beyond describing a disparities problem to providing strategies which can make a difference.

“Strong community health interventions like AAFA’s CHI-ASMA project are among key strategies which can lead to real and lasting solutions to health disparities by targeting social determinants of health via clinical, educational, and environmental interventions,” said Melanie Carver, AAFA’s chief mission officer and principal investigator for the multi-year project.