Introduction: Asthma attacks significantly increase for children and young people (CYP) after returning to school from the summer break. This results in increased hospital admissions, missed school and loss of work days for parents/carers. It is important that we innovate ways to reduce asthma attacks after the new school year, which empower CYP and their families. 

Aims: We created and provided CYP attending our Multidisciplinary Asthma Service (MDAS) clinic with back to school packs aiming to empower them with tools for improving asthma management to prevent/reduce asthma attacks.

Methods: The specialist MDT team developed advice and action plans to provide to CYP, families and schools, combined to form a back to school pack sent to our 120 patients. This included asthma action and school plans, age and treatment-specific inhaler device advice, and advice on wellbeing/exercise/sleep to empower children and families to make them feel prepared and support schools to manage asthma well.

Results: Our response rate from the questionnaires was 15%. The responses from parents show that the packs were thought to be helpful (82%).  In particular the asthma plans (71%) and school plans (77%) were most useful. Parents felt the packs prevented additional visits to school from asthma nurses and helped them manage their child?s asthma after going back to school. The preferred way to receive the packs was via email. 

Conclusion: We have shown that in CYP attending our MDAS clinic, back to school packs were useful and families felt prepared and empowered to reduce the risk of asthma attacks. Future analysis could look at number of asthma attacks over the school year.