Alicia Johnson: I’m Alicia Johnson, my daughter’s Geneses Johnson. She was under the care of Dr. Tyra Bryant-Stephens at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for treatment of asthma. My daughter was diagnosed when she was 2 years old when we first moved here to Philadelphia, and I really didn’t have a lot of resources at that time as far as how I would be as a parent managing her illness. So as such, I got a phone call just out of the blue one day to make me aware of a program that was available called the CAPP Program. It was about asthma prevention. And at first, I kind of thought that maybe well, you know, at the very least I can just, you know, kind of listen to what was being said, or what would be said so that I could better educate myself as to how that was going to pertain to the care of my daughter.

And it basically changed my life; it changed both our lives actually. Geneses, being as young as she was, did not know how this new diagnosis was going to affect her. I, as a parent and not having any type of prior education about the treatment of asthma and the thing and everything that surrounds it, I felt that the program just basically gave me the tools that were necessary in order to not only respond more timely whenever my daughter had like an acute issue, but also just to be more aware of how her — our environment and the things that I was bringing into my home, and things that she was exposed to in school would affect her overall health.

So, we had our first visit, a representative came out, a young lady by the name of Charmaine, and she was awesome. She was very friendly, she came into our home and she made my daughter feel really comfortable about everything that we would be going through. She educated us, and I thought that that was like really important because coming from an environment where I wasn’t really sure what to expect with this new diagnosis. It really meant a lot to me that someone actually made it more personal and tailored it to our immediate needs.

She actually had items that not only pertained to how I would be responding to my child’s care, but also how my daughter could self-manage, which also meant a lot because of the fact that with her being so young, you would think that a kid just wouldn’t get it. But, Charmaine was able to present materials that were on my daughter’s level, coloring books and posters, and things that kind of made my daughter feel like, you know, this wasn’t an issue that was unlike anything else that any other child would go through. But that, you know, it was just one additional thing and that she was basically able to live a regular life like a regular kid and it wasn’t going to have any bearing on anything.

And when Charmaine came to our home, she kindly did a survey and tried to see — like evaluate our environment to try to see what triggers where present that would either exacerbate my daughter’s issue or, you know, those things — looking at both things that would even help us in managing her health, you know, in its well state. And doing so, we were provided a lot of tools, a lot of supplies, and things of that nature that were very beneficial to us. Simple things that you don’t think about, something like changing over from blinds that harbor dust to something like a pull-down shade.

Something as simple as that actually minimized my child’s triggers in the morning, which, you know, we later found out were a great benefit to her actually being able to maintain a steady level of good health and not having so many asthma issues, asthma-related issues.

The program was very good. I will highly recommend it to any and everybody that … I actually still do highly recommend it to any and everybody that I encounter who have this new onset of illness that they may not be very aware of or that they just may need those extra tools to actually manage their child’s health.

So, you’ll find that when you’re trying to schedule appointments for your child, in light of everything else that’s going on, and the influx of information that’s coming in from all these different directions, that it’s hard to manage all those things. You know, you’re a busy mom, busy dad, what have you, and you’re just trying to make sure that you stay on top of everything, every little detail. And, what I also really appreciated about Charmaine was that she was so kind in actually giving us a call, reminder phone calls for doctors’ appointments. Even, you know, scheduling those appointments for us in a lot of cases, following up with us after we’ve had our doctor’s visit just to make sure that if we had any unanswered questions that they were properly addressed.

And that actually just made us even more comfortable and secure in that the information that we were being provided was best for us and that we were being taken care of. CAPP has just been phenomenal.