As part of celebrating #AskAboutAsthma week, Healthy London Partnership hosted a day of presentations and workshops for professionals who work with children and young people diagnosed with asthma across London. The aims of the event were to raise awareness of some of the current issues in asthma care locally, across London, and nationally. The event also shared good practice, disseminated new evidence, and provided networking opportunities.
The Children & Young People’s Health Partnership (CYPHP) joined the day aiming to continue building relationships with other professionals, explore collaboration opportunities, reflect on practice, and build a shared vision for asthma across the city, and beyond. It seemed like attendees had similar aims, as themes from the room included:
CYPHP also contributed to the exciting programme by hosting a workshop on the CYPHP Health Check. Presented by our Asthma specialist nurses and Mental health specialist who, explained that the Health Checks are part of a population based intervention to support parents/carers to increase their knowledge about their child’s asthma, constipation, eczema and/or epilepsy, and general wellbeing.
Once parents/carers have completed the Health Check, they will receive a summary of the results and a Health Support Pack. This pack follows the same three sections as the Health Check, therefore first providing information on the physical condition, its possible triggers, suggestions of management, and a tool to enable parents/carers and their child to talk about what is applicable to them and how they would like to manage their condition together. The pack also contains information on the child’s emotional wellbeing, identifying possible difficulties that children could experience due to their condition, and possible ways to address these. The pack finishes with information about the importance of parental/carer wellbeing, and concludes with a list of community resources that if applicable, parents/carers could access in their own time.
The aim of Health Packs is to increase parental confidence and ability in managing their child’s condition, so that their children can stay as healthy as possible, get better quickly when they’re ill, and to live well with their long-term condition that they may have. As a preventative intervention, it is possible that the Health Checks could consequently decrease the need for parents/carers to attend A&E and/or their GP as often, and could also aid conversations between families and healthcare staff.
For those attending the workshop, we asked if professionals would share the Health Check link with families they think will be eligible. To answer some audience queries, we also explained that the Health Check is being shared in many ways, ensuring that as many eligible children and families as possible are able to access it.
After the workshops, a surprise performance by musicians from ‘Key Changes’ introduced the #AsthmaRapChallenge, with live snippets of bars from the musicians and finally the finished track.
To see talented musicians rapping about asthma was really inspiring. Our team hopes to utilise the track on home visits and in schools to help reduce the stigma associated with asthma, and to encourage young people to feel more comfortable openly discussing their feelings around their asthma, something three of the rappers had personally experienced, but had never expressed in this way before.
The lyrics are really poignant and will hopefully inspire other children and young people to pursue their own asthma rap challenge to win a studio recording session!
CYPHP would like to thank Healthy London Partnership for hosting the event. If you would like more information about the #AskAboutAsthma week, visit twitter to see how CYPHP and other organisations further contributed to the week. You can also click here to find out more information about the CYPHP Asthma team or the Health Check.
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