Home Repairs Through CAPP+ Ended Naomi’s Asthma Flares
Home Repairs Through CAPP+ Ended Naomi’s Asthma Flares
Juanisa is a nurse and had worked in pediatrics during her 18-year nursing career. Yet when her 1-year-old daughter Naomi had a slight wheeze and a lingering cough in early 2021, she figured it was a leftover symptom from the child’s bout of COVID-19.
“I didn’t think they were asthma symptoms,” Juanisa says. “Neither of my two older sons have asthma, so it doesn’t run in our family.”
The family’s primary care pediatrician, Katherine Murray, MD, in the CHOP Care Network Haverford location, made the asthma diagnosis and created Naomi’s asthma care plan. Naomi started taking daily medicine to prevent asthma flare-ups and used rescue medicine to treat them when they did happen. They said goodbye to their cat.
Still, Naomi’s asthma wasn’t well controlled. After she had an urgent care visit, an Emergency Department visit and a hospitalization because of asthma flares, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) connected her family with extra support through the Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP).
CAPP provides asthma education and more
For more than 25 years, CAPP has offered free asthma education classes to families in schools, churches and community centers throughout Philadelphia. They also offer home visits to help families manage their children’s asthma. During these visits, trained experts teach families how to control asthma and identify triggers in the home, helping them remove anything that might make asthma worse.
Around the time Naomi’s asthma worsened, the family had moved into their new house, built in the 1980s, and were busy making it their own. “You walked in, and it was like going back to 1986,” Juanisa says. They tore out the drop ceilings, removed the paneling that covered every wall, pulled up the old carpet, put in new carpeting upstairs and refinished the wood floors downstairs, and replaced the draftiest windows. They deep cleaned everything. It was looking much better.
Little did Juanisa and her husband Shaun know what was lingering behind the walls. But their CAPP home visitor, Robin Williams, saw hidden problems in their home during a home visit.
Hidden asthma triggers
The upstairs carpet in the hallway and in Naomi’s room — even though it was brand-new — was a harbor for dust that frequent vacuuming couldn’t overcome. The bathroom that shared a wall with Naomi’s room had leaky pipes that led to mold behind the walls. The basement, which had a playroom, was damp, and the bathroom down there also had mold. Water was still sneaking in through a roof leak they thought had been repaired.
Williams concluded that Naomi’s asthma couldn’t be well managed with so many triggers in the home.
That’s when Juanisa and Shaun learned about CHOP’s Community Asthma Prevention Program-Plus. CAPP+, which is supported by the hospital’s Healthier Together initiative, provides free home repairs so asthma patients’ homes can be rid of the triggers that send kids like Naomi to the hospital with severe asthma flares.
CAPP+ partnered with Rebuilding Together Philadelphia to take care of the needed renovations to remove mold and stop water intrusion. To keep dampness at bay, they also installed air vents in the bathrooms and kitchen and a whole-house dehumidifier in the basement.
No more asthma problems!
The difference in Naomi’s asthma management has been remarkable, Juanisa says. There have been no ER visits or hospitalizations for Naomi since CAPP+ finished making the repairs.
With her asthma well managed, Naomi, now 4, is free to be a typical preschooler. “Princess Naomi,” as her parents call her, is “a little diva” who loves books, her dolls and having her nails done. After someone reads her a book, she wants to “read” it to them, telling the story in her own words. After she finishes a shapes or colors worksheet her mother has given her in preparation for kindergarten, Naomi will bring Juanisa a page out of one of her coloring books for her mom to do.
“She’ll tell me, ‘It’s your turn, and if you’re good, I’ll give you a star,’” Juanisa says. “She pretty much runs our family.”
CAPP ‘has been a blessing’
“Having a child with asthma is a lot on a family,” Juanisa says. “So, this program really helped me personally learn and educate myself more about triggers and the medicines for Naomi. Being a nurse, I should have known, but I didn’t really understand how complicated it can be. Robin was a very patient teacher and spends as much time as you need to really understand what is what.”
Naomi’s brothers, Chris, 15, and Shaun, 20, have also learned about asthma, early signs of a flare and how to help manage Naomi’s asthma.
“CAPP has been a blessing,” says Juanisa. “I’m thrilled with the home improvements they made for us. I just want to say ‘thank you’ all day long.”