Horner and Fouladi examined changes in rural children's asthma self-management after they received lay health educator-delivered classes. Elementary schools were randomly assigned to the treatment or attention-control condition and participating students received either asthma education or general health promotion education, respectively. The triethnic sample was composed of 183 children (46% Hispanic, 29.5% non-Hispanic white, 22% African American, and 2.6% other categories) who had a mean age of 8.78 years (SD = 1.24). The time frame from baseline to post-intervention was 12 weeks. Repeated measures analysis of variance found main effects in changes in scores for children's asthma knowledge, asthma self-management, self-efficacy for managing asthma symptoms, and metered dose inhaler (MDI) technique and significant group interaction effects for the treatment intervention on the measures of children's asthma knowledge, asthma self-management, and MDI technique.

WHAT THE STUDY MAY MEAN TO YOU AS A HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL: The authors concluded that delivery of an asthma health education intervention by trained lay educators to school-aged children was an effective means for improving children's knowledge and skills in asthma self-management.

WHAT THE STUDY MAY MEAN TO YOU AS A PATIENT: The weakness of the study was the short duration (12 weeks). However, it nicely illustrated that lay educators can teach students with asthma self-management skills. More of these programs need to be introduced into public schools, as well as obtaining long-term follow-up data on the effectiveness of the intervention.

SD Horner, RT Fouladi. Improvement of rural children's asthma self-management by lay health educators. Journal of School Health, 2008;78:506-513.