Asthma is a significant health problem for children in the United States and in the state of Washington, where it affects 104,000 children annually. Environmental triggers such as poor air quality and allergens are significant drivers of asthma morbidity, and exposure to these triggers is heavily influenced by social determinants of health, making asthma an important environmental justice issue and source of health disparities.
Community health worker (CHW) programs such as the Public Health - Seattle & King County (PHSKC) Asthma Program bring CHWs into homes where they address environmental triggers directly by performing an environmental home inspection and provide education and support. The PHSKC program and other similar models have been consistently proven to improve asthma outcomes and reduce health care costs. During the coronavirus pandemic, in-person CHW services have been curtailed, and the use of remote or virtual platforms (e.g., Zoom) has been proposed due to their rapid uptake in other venues. However, reliance on such technologies raises concerns regarding barriers to access of technology experienced by disadvantaged populations, technical feasibility of adapting the environmental home inspection to a virtual format and acceptability of such an intervention to participants and CHWs.
This pilot project addresses asthma disparities by using a community-engaged approach in collaboration with PHSKC to develop a remote video technology-based intervention to reduce exposure to environmental triggers in marginalized children. The first phase of this project gathers perspectives from parents of children with asthma and community health workers on what a virtual intervention should look like. The second phase involves collaboration with the team at PHSKC to develop the new intervention. In the third phase, we will pilot the new intervention by delivering it to parents of kids with asthma, and we’ll test the intervention’s acceptability and feasibility.