When symptoms are recognized, or there isn't a tailored action plan for controlling symptoms, children with asthma miss more school days, make more visits to the emergency department and need to be hospitalized more often than other children. A Practice Challenge Asthma management has become a significant challenge for the primary care provider over the last decade. Recent guidelines from an expert panel convened through the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute outlined a strategy that involves classification of severity, pharmacologic therapy and patient education. While these guidelines should work well in theory, they may pose specific issues for the primary care provider who wants to implement them when caring for a child with asthma. For example, the assessment guidelines are difficult to implement with young children, particularly infants and toddlers.
Parents often have concerns about prescribed therapies that require time-consuming discussions.
And, most importantly, providing adequate asthma education to children and their families requires a great deal of physician and nurse time-time that may be difficult to provide in a busy primary care setting. How We Can Help The Asthma Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is dedicated to addressing these asthma management issues while enabling you to maintain the unique provider relationship you have with your patient. Our multispecialty, multidisciplinary team provides children and their families with timely education, assessment and treatment of pediatric asthma. We teach children and their families to recognize asthma symptoms and control them before they become a problem. Each family is provided with a written action plan.