"How do we help each Family Assistant understand that he/she plays a vital role in the life of a student living with asthma and residing in transitional housing?” This is the question that Jenelle Rose of the New York City Department of Education posed to the group. There are over 35,000 people living in New York City shelters, of those people, 8,213 are families with children, a staggering number of these cases relate to asthma. The liaisons to these families are the Family Assistants (FA) who reaches out to the parent/guardian of the children. They empathize with the family’s living condition, and understand the importance of the children in that demographic, staying in school. The intake form or questionnaire right now is administered by the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and the Department of Homeless (DOH). While the Family Assistants (FAs) were trained to complete the health questionnaires, there is inconsistent data being reported. The difference between the two questions: “does your child have asthma?” and “does your child wheeze at night?” results in irregular data, which becomes problematic for empirical research. Jenelle asked the group for suggestions on ways to align the data resulting in more meaningful outcomes. The group suggestions include:
- Agree that the first step is to form a common question to be asked from both groups
- Gather both DHS & DOA FAs together for a meeting and provide an in-service for each group
- Merge the surveys into one and make them both electronic
- Provide FAs training on ACT test and let them know how much bad data can cost the community
- Instruct FAs to inform the parents/guardians where the free clinics are located to enroll in Medicaid
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