Health Care Setting

The Minnesota Department of Health has created a free home environmental assessment training, named Reducing Environmental Triggers of Asthma–Home, or RETA-Home. This program teaches you about the triggers of asthma found in the home and suggests simple interventions that can limit or eliminate exposure to them. It also tours a home to show areas where asthma triggers are found. The training takes about 40 minutes to view. It includes pre- and post-test questions that highlight important points, and you may print out a certificate of completion at the end. In addition, there is a resource section that can be accessed both during the program and after the program has been completed.

This training utilizes the expertise of individuals who have extensive experience in both providing in-home asthma management and conducting home assessments. It builds on data from projects showing that environmental interventions, coupled with in-home asthma medical management, are effective in reducing nighttime symptoms, missed school days, and the number of asthma hospital visits and unscheduled, urgent care office visits.

This training program was made possible from grants from EPA Region V and CDC.

School-based health centers (SBHCs) have steadily increased in numbers across the United States over the last 3 decades.

The most recent SBHC census, conducted in 2004 to 2005 by the National Assembly of School Based Health Care, identified more than 1709 SBHC programs in the United States.  This shift in the delivery of health care for children is premised on the assumption that access to health services in school increases access to health care and improves health status among children, especially for those children whose access to care is otherwise limited.  Health status is often measured by health-related quality of life (HRQOL), which attempts to tap the current health perception of individuals.  HRQOL has been demonstrated in both social scientific and clinical research to predict future health status, health care utilization and costs, and even mortality.

For example, a study linking the 1992 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey with the 1993 Medicare Continuous History Survey found that a person’s response to a selfrated health question accurately predicted that individual’s respective use of health care services over the next year.  Only a few studies, however, have examined the connection between HRQOL and health care utilization and health care cost savings among children.  The link between HRQOL and utilization among Canadian adolescents was examined by Vingilis et al. with a single measure of perceived general health status that asked children to rank their answer on a 5-point scale from excellent to poor.  They found that reductions in perceived health over time were associated with increases in physician services and declines in dental care. This anomaly in usage across service providers may reflect differences between preventive dental care (representing the majority of dental services), which is not covered by publicly funded Canadian Medicare, and insured, curative health services.

This tool lists controller and quick relief medications, their class, age recommendation, doses/strengths, and priming protocols.