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Tyra Bryant-Stephens, MD

Director, Community Asthma Prevention Program

Attending physician

Community research

Dr. Tyra Bryant-Stephens founded the Community Asthma Prevention Program of Philadelphia at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in 1997. As medical director of the program, she leads a staff of 12 that includes RN Clinical and Educational Coordinators as well as lay Home Visitors.

CAPP's first project, funded by the U.S. Department of Health's Office of Minority Health, aimed to improve the health and well-being of children with asthma by providing free asthma classes in the community for parents and their children with asthma. The project also supported a new way of providing education- in the homes of children with asthma where parents learned about the types of environmental changes that could be made to improve their child’s asthma. In offering home visits and free asthma education, CAPP satisfied a strong need in the West Philadelphia community and received tremendously positive feedback from families and class participants.

In 2000 and 2001, CAPP’s success in providing asthma education in the home and community was expanded when Dr. Bryant-Stephens received grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Through the NIH-funded “Community Partnerships for Asthma Prevention” CAPP was able to continue to offer free home visits to the West Philadelphia community. Free asthma education classes continued to be offered through a grant from the Pew foundation.

Also in 2001, CAPP received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to expand its work into the North Philadelphia area. In this project CAPP has worked with a collaborative of partners to implement four main interventions: community asthma education classes, home visits, primary care provider training, and education for schools personnel. In 2005 CAPP also began to offer free asthma education classes to children in Philadelphia public and charter schools. In another new project, as part of the Merck Company Foundation’s Merck Childhood Asthma Initiative, CAPP is expanding home visiting and community classes to areas of the city that were not previously served- neighborhoods in South, Northwest and Northeast Philadelphia.

 

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