Improving Childhood Asthma Management Toolkit

Overview

This toolkit is intended for clinicians and health service staff. It provides resources and strategies to help: 

• clinicians provide high-quality, consistent care for children with asthma
• clinicians support children and their families to build the skills and confidence to manage asthma effectively
• health services test, adapt and implement meaningful change in childhood asthma care.

We encourage health services and clinicians to test and adopt these strategies in their service.

What’s included in the toolkit?

The toolkit includes: 

• steps for building an improvement team and applying quality improvement methods
• strategies for improving asthma management across hospital and community settings
• ready-to-use resources, checklists and templates
• real-world case studies from health services 

The toolkit includes the ‘MAGIC’ change package – five key elements for improving asthma management across hospital and community settings:

• Medications: Ensuring that children leave hospital with the right medicines or prescriptions.
• Asthma action plan: Providing families with a clear asthma action plan and education they understand.
• GP (General Practitioner) integration: Linking hospital care with a GP follow-up and ensuring timely communication between hospitals and primary care providers.
• Inhaler and spacer technique: Teaching children and families how to use inhalers and spacers before they leave the hospital.
• Community Asthma Program: Referring families to community-based asthma programs so they can access ongoing care and support after they leave the hospital.

How the toolkit was developed

This toolkit brings together the key learnings from the Improving Childhood Asthma Management (ICAM) collaborative. The improvement strategies were developed through the ICAM collaborative in partnership with Victorian health services, who co designed, tested and implemented changes in real world settings across Melbourne’s inner north and west.

Learn more about how the toolkit was developed

Why this is important

Asthma is one of the most common chronic conditions affecting Australian children. In Victoria, children experience high rates of emergency presentations and potentially preventable hospitalisations. This toolkit aims to reduce that burden on children, families, and health services.

Each hospital presentation or admission for asthma is an opportunity to build parents’ and children’s skill to better manage asthma and improve health outcomes. Providing high-quality, consistent care from the outset helps children and families build the skills and confidence to manage asthma effectively at home, school, and in the community.

Asthma in the Australian context

• Asthma is one of the most common chronic conditions in children, affecting 10.1% of Australian children aged up to 14 years. It is the leading cause of disease burden in this age group (ABS, 2023).
• Asthma is one of the leading reasons for emergency department presentations for children under 18 years of age (AIHW, 2024).  
• 80% of hospitalisations for asthma in children are identified as potentially preventable, indicating opportunities for improved management and education (Chan et al., 2021).  
• The condition has a significant impact on carers, leading to missed workdays and loss of productivity (Asthma Australia & National Asthma Council Australia, 2015).  
• Asthma leads to a significant economic burden on the health system (AIHW, 2024).
• About 50% of children diagnosed with asthma before age five may grow out of it; the other 50% will have a lifelong condition (Silber et al., 2016).

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the many individuals and organisations who have supported the ICAM collaborative.

We thank Asthma Australia  for their investment and advocacy and DPV Health for their leadership in recruiting childhood asthma lived experience experts to guide and enrich the collaborative.

We also extend our sincere appreciation to the 7 participating healthcare organisations whose commitment and contributions have been instrumental to the success of the collaborative:

• The Royal Children's Hospital
• Northern Health
• Western Health –  Sunshine Emergency Department & Hospital Admission Risk Program (HARP) Community Asthma Program (CAP)
• Victorian Virtual Emergency Department (VVED)
• DPV Health
• Cohealth
• Werribee Mercy Hospital.

Disclaimer

The content presented in the ICAM toolkit is intended to be viewed as a collection of improvement ideas and concepts designed to support best practice in childhood asthma care. It does not constitute medical advice and should not be interpreted as such. All accompanying evidence, including the rationale behind the inclusion of specific concepts and change ideas, is referenced in the supporting materials and reference list.