Lessons Learned: Asthma Healthy Homes Pilots
Green & Healthy Homes Initiative is a leading nonprofit, technical assistance provider for asthma and healthy homes programs across the country. An important component of our technical assistance capacity includes designing and implementing asthma home visiting models that include the assessment and remediation of home-based asthma triggers. In many of our projects, we help local partners design pilot projects to test new or improved program models, especially if they include coordination of new service provider agencies.
Although asthma home visiting programs vary from program to program, they usually consist of the following basic components:
• Referral from health care entity or agency based on patient’s uncontrolled asthma; this could be due to an asthma exacerbation, medical event, or provider referral.
• Home visits performed by a healthcare professional such as a nurse or community health worker; these visits cover basic asthma education, asthma self-care practices, medication management, and discussion of behaviors that may contribute to asthma exacerbation.
• Environmental assessment of the home environment performed by an environmental assessor which consists of a room-by-room walk-through to identify potential asthma triggers.
• Environmental remediation of asthma triggers is performed if resources are available to do so. Con-tractors and subcontracts perform home repairs to remove asthma triggers.
• Follow-up via phone calls and additional home visits reinforce asthma education, collect data for evaluation purposes, and ensure that program services have a sustained impact.
• Data collection throughout the program, including outcomes data (e.g. asthma control test scores) and process evaluation (e.g. efficiency of moving client from intake to first home visit)
