EPA Region 3
Topic: Asthma 2011
Date: May 12, 2011
Janice Bolden: Americans spend up to 90% of their time indoors, so they’re more susceptible to whatever the indoor triggers are, particularly those asthmatic children and adults.
Bonnie Smith: That’s Janice Bolden, EPA’s Mid-Atlantic regional asthma program manager. And I’m Bonnie Smith, and this is Environment Matters, our series of environmental podcasts. Today we’ll hear about the ways health care professionals and community organizations can better assist families with asthma.
Janice Bolden talks about the regional asthma program.
Janice Bolden: We want to focus on community-based organizations, and we feel that community-based organizations really have the pulse of the community. They know what the issues are in the community. They know who they need to serve: both audiences—the family and the primary care physicians, the professionals. So we really focus our efforts in Region 3 on the community-based organizations. NNCC is one of the community-based organization members.
Bonnie Smith: NNCC is the National Nursing Center Consortium. Here’s their program coordinator, Tameka Wall.
Tameka Wall: We’re talking a lot about healthy homes these days, but one of the components to a healthy home is making sure we have safe environment for asthmatics--not only children but families--so we’ve done a lot of talking in the past about lead poisoning prevention. But we also want to make sure that we’re including information about how to address asthma symptoms and triggers. So, as far as NCC goes, a part of our mission is to reduce health disparities. And with our asthma program we provide them with the education and tools and resources to live a healthier life within their homes.
Bonnie Smith: Tameka Wall, NNCC, talks about the workshops: May 17 and 18, in Philadelphia. They’re funded through a grant from EPA.
Tameka Wall: The workshop is called the Asthma and Environmental Education for Philadelphia Health Professionals. This workshop will be provided by the National Nursing Center Consortium. What we will do is educate 100 health professionals on asthma environmental triggers. We’re trying to close that gap for our asthmatic clients.
Bonnie Smith: Tameka Wall, NNCC, talks about the need for health care providers to understand home health triggers.
Tameka Wall: Well it’s so important because we find that a lot of our clients, they have the information about medication, but where the gap lies is that their health care providers can do little or nothing about the triggers that they have in their homes. So we can educate providers on how to address those problems in the home, then possibly we can reduce those asthma triggers for our clients and they can visit the ER and have less overnight stays in the hospital.
Bonnie Smith: To sign up for these workshops, you can go online to the National Nursing Center Consortium’s website, or you can call 215 731-2474.
Tameka Wall: With these workshops we’re trying to be proactive. I spoke a little bit about what are, what we can do in a clinical setting to affect how the patient review care, but also what we are trying to do is target nursing faculty and nursing students and hopefully by them coming to this workshop we can impact the nursing curricula. Many of the nurses, when they’ re in school, they really don’t learn much about environmental hazards. And so hopefully as a result of this workshop our long term goal is that we will impact the nursing curricula to include environmental hazards.
Bonnie Smith: Janice, where can our listeners go online for additional information or webinars or resources?
Janice Bolden: They can definitely go to our website. It’s www.epa.gov and just type in asthma. And we encourage community-based organizations to join the community asthma network at www.communityasthmanetwork.org to enhance their programs, because there are various asthma resources on the website. It’s like reaching out,it’s like a library of resources. So I would encourage them to get on the website and I would encourage them to register as well.
Bonnie Smith: I’m going to repeat those references again. Call the National Nursing Center Consortium for the upcoming workshops. Check out www.epa.gov/asthma, and go to www.communityasthmanetwork.org
Thank you, Janice and Tameka, and thank you for listening to Environment Matters, our series of environmental podcasts.