School Nurses, Asthma, and Trust: Stories, Messaging, and Technology

• In Event: The Community Health Worker (CHW) Initiative: Responsive Engagement, Community Capacity and Emergent Health

Abstract

Asthma is a controllable disease, and many professionals find it frustrating that parents won’t comply with the doctor’s orders about daily medication. Various projects have sought to bolster the expert messaging, mostly with education campaigns aimed at the individual patient’s parent(s), and sometimes including changes in the style of messaging. Our program sees that those communications seem salutary and innocent, but too often end up undercutting the trust in one’s own capacity. The CHW Initiative worked to provide positive mechanisms for building trust in the community setting and allowing that trust to frame the encounter with the expert messaging. The model for enabling trust allows strength and capacity for individual and community health to precede technologies of diagnoses and treatment of disease.

Author

• Cindy Paz, University of Houston, Honors College