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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.

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Hi @ElleBJ01 - thank you for reaching out regarding our program! I sent you an email to the address on file. Looking forward to learning more about your work in the Imperial Valley.

Lorene

Lorene

CHI-ASMA sounds like a perfect partner for our project Breathe IE, here in Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California. We are a non profit that has been funded to help children, aged 3-18 years old, with asthma and their families to recognize and reduce triggers in the home environment. Community Health Workers, such as myself, work with these families, either virtually or in-home, using a curriculum that is engaging and interactive, so that children and their families are excited by the activities and eager to apply what they learn to display their understanding of the concepts they've been taught. Our program is broken down to 3-5 visits, with the number of visits being dependent upon the individual client's needs. We also look at the families needs and seek to offer auxiliary services, if there are needs that we are able to fulfill. It would be wonderful if we could find out more about your program and if there were some way we might be able to partner. Please contact me if this is a possibility, or if you have any ideas that might be beneficial to our organization. Thank you, Elle

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