Asthma remains one of the most challenging chronic illnesses faced by school nurses both nationally and in the State of West Virginia. There is a clear need to provide ongoing continuing asthma education to school nurses. However, nurses face many barriers to receiving this education. The purpose of this pilot project was to develop and evaluate distance learning technology as a method to deliver continuing asthma education to school nurses in West Virginia. A sample of 20 school nurses from 2 counties in West Virginia participated in the study using the Wimba live classroom distance learning program. Significant modest improvements were found in both the intervention groups compared to a control group postintervention. The results of this pilot study are promising and show that distance learning technology could be a viable solution for school nurses to receive asthma continuing education.

This study examines perceived quality of life (QOL) in a convenience sample of children (aged 7-11) with asthma and their parents from two schools in rural West Virginia. Forty-nine child-parent dyads representing 25 males and 24 females completed the study. The PedsQL™ 3.0 Asthma Module was utilized to separately measure child and parent perceptions of various dimensions of pediatric, asthma-specific, health-related QOL. Dimensions of the tool were scored separately and included symptoms, treatment, worry, and communication. The mean module dimension scores for children ranged from 63.27 to 80.47 and for parents, the range was from 61.26 to 79.79, with higher scores indicating higher QOL. Parents of male children perceived their son's QOL to be higher than that of female children in the symptoms and treatment dimensions. Strong relationships occurred between the child's worry and the other three dimensions as well as between the symptoms and the treatment dimensions. For the dyads, the only significant relationship was between the child and the adult treatment dimensions. With the well-documented burden of asthma in school-aged populations, information regarding the QOL of child and parent dyads will enhance school nurses' ability to improve health and educational outcomes in schools.