Hospitals in Action >> Case Examples

GEARY COMMUNITY HOSPITAL IN COLLABORATION WITH
THE GEARY COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION, Junction City, KS
Geary Community Asthma Initiative

What is it?
Geary Community Hospital and the Geary Community Healthcare Foundation implemented a plan to help children better manage their asthma.  We began by bringing the American Lung Association Open Airways for Schools to area schools to help children learn compliance and adherence to treatment.  We provide numerous continuing education opportunities for GCH healthcare professionals, school nurses, and area health agency personnel. These professionals continually report that these are extremely valuable in making them more confident in their treatment skills.  We make equipment available to youth including Action Cards (a laminated set of instructions which detail responses to an attack from the first signs to the most severe symptoms) and Peak Flow Meters (to provide the necessary baseline vital in determining the responses necessary to an attack).  These items are distributed through healthcare providers to those who need them regardless of an ability to pay.  We created a reporting system so that our supervising Respiratory Technician now monitors all cases so that information and treatment are consistent and results are measured.  We measure that success by fewer reported missed days in school due to asthma-related illness, fewer attacks of a severity that leads to the emergency room, and fewer children being seen in the emergency room who have never been seen by a family physician.  Ultimately, success means that there is consistent information and care for each child from the home, through the school nurse, through the family physician, the respiratory therapist and any other healthcare professional that the child sees.

Who is it for? 
The entire patient cachement area for Geary Community Hospital with an emphasis on children.

Why do they do it?
Our supervising Respiratory Technician and Emergency Room personnel were concerned that there was a need for a better and more coordinated treatment for asthma among youth.  Children, in some cases, were arriving in the Emergency Room in the midst of an attack without ever having seen a family physician.  This meant that they were often not receiving consistent information about the management of their asthma.  School nurses were providing front line treatment to the children in our community with a large number of asthma sufferers in each school, yet their training in helping children better manage their own asthma was not as high quality as it could be.  We recognized, that as the major healthcare facility in our area, we needed to provide the information and the tools necessary to more successfully understand and manage asthma regardless of family income or ability to pay.  We also recognized the need for consistent and high-quality training and information for parents, teachers, school nurses, hospital personnel and physicians. And we wanted to have a better tracking system to ensure that the program was successful.  In the short term, we wanted to respond immediately to the needs of those children whose asthma often goes undetected or under-treated.  In the long term, we wanted to enable children to have fewer and less severe asthma attacks, have more confidence in their ability to take steps to manage their asthma and exert greater influence on their parents' asthma management decisions.

Contact: Jolana Montgomery-Matney
785-238-3787
jmontgomery@gchks.org