PolicyLab

Tyra Bryant-Stephens is a faculty member at PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), senior director of the Center for Health Equity at CHOP and the medical director of the Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP). Her research focuses on the use of community-based interventions to improve child asthma outcomes for underserved populations.

Dr. Bryant-Stephens founded CAPP in 1997. As medical director of the program, she leads a staff of 12 that includes registered nurse clinical and educational coordinators as well as lay home visitors. CAPP was designed 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 (NIH). 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 school’s 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.

Dr. Bryant-Stephens completed her MD at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wakeforest University and her residency in pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia.