Plan to help Wollongong kids breathe easier as city becomes 'asthma smart'

The project, called Breathe Better in the Gong, is being jointly run by local health promotion group Healthy Cities Illawarra and Asthma Australia, and is designed to make the local government area a leader in asthma prevention.

Funded by an ongoing bequest from the Pearl Sheppard Fund, made by a Wollongong woman in the 1980s, the project will focus on children aged five to nine years old, as asthma has the greatest negative impact on this age group.

Health Cities Illawarra CEO Kelly Andrews said Wollongong was already performing better than NSW in terms of childhood asthma rates.

"Wollongong itself has got lower than the state average of pediatric asthma according to the council's State of the Children report," she said.

"Kids aged 2 to 15, who have ever had asthma in our region was about 16 per cent, while for the state it was 21 per cent."

However, she said there was always room for improvement, with most asthma presentations to the emergency department avoidable.

"It's probably one of the scariest things you can experience, not to be able to breathe, and symptoms can be really inconsistent from person to person," she said.

"So when you're experiencing the inability to breathe and the complexities of asthma with other allergies and the potential for anaphylaxis, it can be a really serious condition to live with.

"Most of the hospital admissions come from children, and we want to stop that feeling of helplessness that parents and teachers experience."

Healthy Cities is currently recruiting for a Community Collaboration Facilitator of Asthma Projects, with the successful applicant to work with schools, healthcare providers, advocacy groups, and government agencies to to improve asthma-friendly environments.

Already, three schools have signed up to be part of the project, and Ms Andrews said there could be a range of outcomes at the end of the project which would be driven by the community.

"The idea of this project is to work with the community to understand their barriers and what's keeping them from really managing their own condition well, and doing our best across the medical system, but also outside the health system to support self management," she said.

For instance, she said an asthma smart community may consider how air quality can affect asthmatics during different parts of the year.

"Perhaps we would be a community that understands daily air quality just like we understand the UV index or the bushfire rating system," she said.

"Having that high level, easy to digest information, we would understand what is a good day for an asthmatic maybe to stay indoors."

"And then it might come down to your neighbourhood, where if you know that your neighbour's kids have got asthma, maybe you won't have a fire in your backyard, for instance."

"This position hopefully is going to be a little bit of a glue that can bring everybody together and look a bird's eye view at the whole system and start to unpack all those barriers for individuals and communities to keep them breathing better."

She said the would hopefully save the health system money, as it was cheaper to prevent health problems than to treat people in hospital.

Overall, the Illawarra has a higher percentage of people with asthma than across NSW, with data on chronic diseases from the last Census showing 8.7 per cent of people in the region have the condition.

This was compared to 7.8 per cent in NSW.

The 2530 Dapto postcode has the highest percentage of people with asthma, at 10.1 per cent, followed by Albion Park, Berkeley, Windang and Woonona.