Conducting Asthma Counseling

Asthma counseling is the core component of the CHAMPS intervention. The Asthma Counselor educates patients and their families on asthma and teaches them how to manage the disease via proper medication use, behavior change, allergen avoidance, and environmental allergen mitigation. Asthma counseling is patient-tailored with each counseling session personalized to the patient’s allergic sensitivity, environmental exposures, disease knowledge, and current behaviors.

 

The Asthma Counselor uses the CHAMPS tools to learn about each patient’s unique experience with asthma, asthma management, allergic sensitivity, and environmental exposures, and then provides a tailored counseling intervention.

 

The CHAMPS intervention consists of three basic components: 

  1. Asthma and allergic sensitivity assessment – Learn more in the Allergen Sensitivity Testing section of the Manual.
  2. Home environment assessment – Learn more in the Home Environment Assessment section of the Manual.
  3. Patient-tailored asthma counseling – Learn more in the Tailoring the Intervention section of the Manual.

Asthma counselors may be responsible for some or all of these steps, depending on how your practice is organized.  Steps (1) and (2) provide the personalized, patient-specific information needed to craft a tailored intervention in step (3). 

 

Counseling is delivered via face-to-face interactions, either at the practice or in the patient’s home.  The counseling objectives and topics for each visit occur in a recommended order that is unique to the patient, based on his/her specific asthma risks, environmental exposures, and allergic sensitivities.  Counselors conduct a minimum of four counseling visits in the year-long CHAMPS intervention, but additional visits may be scheduled if a patient needs additional time to complete their specific counseling objectives.  Likewise, visits may continue beyond a year to help families achieve optimum control over the patient’s asthma.  No two patients are the same, and families will progress through the counseling components at different speeds and with varying degrees of success.     

   

The Conducting Asthma Counseling section of the Manual provides detailed instructions that cover all phases of the CHAMPS asthma counseling intervention. In addition to studying the CHAMPS materials provided on this site, we strongly recommend that asthma counselors seek external asthma education training and certification via the National Asthma Educator Certification Board. You can also learn more in this brief CHAMPS e-Learning video.