Original ArticleImproving follow-up for children with asthma after an acute Emergency Department visit
Section snippets
Subjects
The subjects of this study were parents who brought their children to St. Louis Children's Hospital Emergency Department for treatment of an acute asthma exacerbation from February 1999 to May 2001. Inclusion criteria were parents of children 2 to 12 years of age, with Medicaid or no medical insurance. A child was considered to have asthma if the parent stated a physician had made the diagnosis. Exclusion criteria were (1) admission to hospital at the time of the ED visit, (2) chronic illness
Results
We enrolled 527 parents from February 1, 1999, to May 31, 2001: 264 in control and 263 in intervention groups (Figure 1). The groups were similar with regard to the child and parent characteristics (Table I). Chronic asthma symptoms were not significantly different between groups (Table I). The demographic characteristics of the children of parents who participated and who declined to participate were similar (Table II). The demographic characteristics were also similar between parents and
Discussion
The combination of two telephone coaching calls and monetary incentive significantly improved the frequency of asthma-planning visits after acute asthma ED visits for a group of low-income urban children. The coaching focused on communicating the need and importance of a PCP asthma-planning visit immediately after an acute exacerbation. Coaching provided the opportunity to reinforce recommendations made at the time of discharge from the ED and discuss benefits and possible barriers to making
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2021, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In PracticeCitation Excerpt :Current evidence on the role of facilitated follow-up is somewhat conflicting. For example, 2 RCTs reported that facilitated referral of ED patients to the primary care providers did not change long-term asthma outcomes.129,131 In contrast, another RCT in an ED setting by Zeiger et al132 demonstrated that facilitated referral to an asthma specialist significantly reduced the risk of subsequent ED visits for asthma exacerbation.
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Supported by the National Institutes of Health: Heart, Lung, and Blood Institutes (HL 21512).