You are a Public Health Nurse assigned to 3 elementary schools in the county. You have been reviewing studies and reports on the prevalence of asthma among school-aged children in the state and the high costs of emergency room visits due to the lack of managing asthma adequately. Visits to the emergency room due to asthma may be avoided if there is adequate training of the child, parent, and school personnel on how to manage asthma, including the proper use of an inhaler. The main problems seem to be children not carrying their inhalers, not being instructed on the proper use of their inhalers, and a lack of understanding of when to use the inhaler. So you decide to gather more data regarding the prevalence of asthma among the children in each of your 3 assigned elementary schools and you discover that the rates of asthma in each of the 3 schools is higher than the state rate.
Answer the following questions:
1. Is Asthma a public health issue?
2. How would you go about developing a program to improve the management of asthma for school-aged children?
3. Where would you begin?
4. What resources would you consider using or exploring?
5. Who would you collaborate with to develop the program?
6. Would you want to do a pilot program in 1 of the 3 schools or implement the program all at one time in all 3 schools?
7. How would you evaluate the success of the program?
8. List as many resources as you can to help address the above situation.
