Empowering Parents through Asthma Education

The main practice-based problem of the report submitted by McCarthy, et al (2002) in the article “Empowering Parents through Asthma Education” is to determine the more effective method on how parents should be educated with regards to asthma, which is considered as one of the most common chronic illness among children. It has been a common understanding among medical practitioners that childhood asthma is one that requires a multi-faceted approach in order for this to be treated and managed.

It has been accepted that addressing asthma is not just one that can be resolved by treatment alone.In order to effectively control asthma attacks, proper education must be given to both patients and family members. This is because an individual who is inflicted with asthma is not the only one that is affected. Rather, it is an illness that affects other members of the family as well. Currently there are two kinds of methods used in order to educate patients and family members about asthma treatment and management.

The first is the use of what the authors termed as the “traditional” method (McCarthy et al 2002, par. 1).These methods include the use of behavioral interventions of the patients and family members in order to facilitate educating patients and family members in terms of effective asthma control and management. Although the authors have mentioned this in their literature review portion of the article, the authors did not provide comprehensive information with regards to the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of these traditional methods.

The authors presented relatively comprehensive information in terms of the second approach with has been classified as the empowerment approach.However, there are some pieces of information that could have been added as part of the literature review of the study. For instance, the article stated that the empowerment approach has been used since the early 1990s (McCarthy et al 2002). Although the authors have defined in the Literature Review what the empowerment approach encompasses, there was no pertinent information with regards to how this is applied and used by medical practitioners to educate patients and family members with regards to the effective management and control of various chronic diseases, including asthma.Almost all of the information used in the literature review was relatively current based on the date when the article was published and coming from primary source materials.

While there were some materials used as part of the literature review were dated later than 5 years prior to the publication of the article, the information these materials provided were nevertheless relevant and provides data which are vital to the entire article. The central question that the authors formulated for this study was “…to compare the outcomes of traditional and empowering approaches to asthma education” (McCarthy et al 2002, par. 2). The development of this question as the primary purpose of the study is in line with the authors determining, based on initial research conducted as part of the literature review of the study. While the authors have discovered that the concept of the empowerment approach is not a new one, there is presently not much research conducted regarding the effectiveness of the empowerment approach towards the control and education of patients and family members with regards to various chronic diseases.Furthermore, the authors, through their initial research done for the literature review of the study, discovered the potential of the empowerment approach when it is used by medical professionals as part of their treatment to patients diagnosed with breast cancer.

The study then is to determine whether the same effectiveness will be experienced when the empowerment approach is used to educate patients and their family members regarding asthma management and control (McCarthy et al 2002).In line with the objective of the study, the authors presented the Family-Centered Assessment and Intervention model as the theoretical framework that had been used for the study. Through this theoretical framework the readers of the article are given not just a background of the importance of the role of educating other members of the family as well as strengthen the hypothesis of the authors of the study that the use of the empowerment approach for educating parents and patients suffering from asthma as the more effective approach when compared to the use of traditional methods.This is because it had defined the term empowerment as the ability of a family member to improve and expand his or her resources in order to function better within that family (McCarthy et al 2002). Research Design The study conducted by the authors of the article utilized the quasi-experimental design in order to collect the quantitative data that the authors would be gathering as part of the study.While it can be assumed that since the study is a comparative analysis as to which approach, traditional or empowerment, is more effective in providing the needed education for parents of patients suffering from asthma, the data will be gathered will be qualitative in nature, the various discussions and subsequent conclusions derived by the authors with regards to the study were tabulated through the use of various scores derived as the study was being conducted.

These scores were tabulated from the answers selected by those that participated in the study from a selection of possible answers (McCarthy et al 2002). Unfortunately, there was no justification provided by the authors of the study as to why this was the research design that they have selected in order to gather data for the research being conducted in reference to the overall objective of the study presented which is to determine whether the empowerment approach for educating parents of patients suffering from asthma. Sampling Method of the StudyBecause the objective of the study was to determine which approach for educating the parents of patients suffering from asthma would be more effective in terms of educating them with regards to proper management and control of asthma, it follows that the population of interest used for this study were parents of children suffering from asthma (McCarthy et al 2002). While there was no introduction provided by the authors of the study to give a background on the method of sampling, the authors did provide their justification for their selection of their sample for the study.All of the participants of the study conducted were parents of children suffering from moderate asthma based on the definition provided by the Department of Health in the United States.

The children were between the ages of 3 and 16 years old. On top of this, the parents must be able to read, write and understand English. Furthermore, the parents of the children suffering from moderate asthma were those that were referred by five different physicians on the first day of consultation.The latter criterion was done by the authors in order to eliminate any form of bias and prejudice that may taint the study making it unreliable (McCarthy et al 2002).

Methods and Procedures of the Study The study was conducted for a period of three weeks where the participants of the study were grouped into two: one group of parents was educated regarding the management and control of asthma using the traditional method and the other group educated using the empowerment approach.This served as the independent variable of the study conducted. The dependent variable derived was the effectiveness of the approach through the various answers provided by the parents six months after the sessions which lasts an average of 2-3 hours each week for three weeks in a survey that had been distributed to these parents (McCarthy et al 2002).Apart from the sessions that were given to both groups of parents, those that were included in the empowerment approach group were provided with follow up calls from the researchers and the nurses that conducted the training sessions.

These were in order to allow the parents in this group to assess for themselves the progress of the entire family in relation to coping and dealing with the situation of having a family member inflicted with asthma (McCarthy et al 2002).Results of the Study Based on the data gathered by the researchers in the study conducted, they were able to determine that while there were not much difference in the scores between parents who were educated with traditional and empowerment methods with regards to the facts about asthma, the researchers have determined that the data derived stated that the scores derived have shown that there has been substantial improvement in the manner as to how they are able to make decisions.The results of the data tabulated had shown that the parents who were trained using the empowerment approach showed that they have been more skilled to be able to handle and manage their family in relation to the fact that one of their family members is inflicted with asthma (McCarthy et al 2002). ConclusionIn the conclusion portion of the article, the researchers have been able to effectively support their hypothesis that the empowerment approach is indeed more effective as opposed to traditional approaches. Moreover, the researchers were able to support the findings of previous studies conducted which were initially presented during the literature review.