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Children living in Washington Heights and Inwood have one of the highest rates for asthma in all of Manhattan because of the area's pollution and because families often wait too long for diagnosis.
The Mailman School of Public Health has been assisting these children through an initiative called Asthma Basics for Children (ABC), aimed at parents of children with asthma. And now, with the help of a $2 million grant from the Merck pharmaceutical company to the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital and the Ambulatory Care Network (ACN) of New York-Presbyterian, in partnership with the Mailman School of Public Health. The program will work with community groups to offer services such as home visits to identify environmental triggers for asthma.
"We expect to offer these new services to about 250 families a year," said Sally Findley, the director of ABC and soon to be the co-principal investigator for the new program, called WIN for Asthma.
According to Findley, ABC currently reaches about 1,500 families per year, but the education is in a group environment, using handbooks. "The group asthma education is helpful for families whose children do not have severe or persistent asthma," Findley says, "but for those who do, extra support is needed to help these families find the best way to bring their children's asthma under control."
Besides home visits, the extra support will include training for community physicians about early treatment methods.
Mary McCord, a pediatrician at Morgan Stanley's Children's Hospital and slated to be WIN's principal investigator, said that one reason the asthma rates for children in these neighborhoods is so high is that people wait too long to treat it.
"Often only acute episodes of asthma are treated -- and that's during visits to the emergency department -- visits that are preventable," she said.
"The sooner we can help families manage their children's asthma, the sooner the children can benefit," she added, "not only by staying out of the hospital but also by full participation in school and sports activities. Once the early treatment methods are mastered, the children and their families stand to benefit for years." |
