The National Lung Health Education Program: roots, mission, future directions.

The National Lung Health Education Program (NLHEP), founded in 1997, is a national health care initiative to promote early diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and related disorders. NLHEP creates and provides lung health publications for laypeople and health professionals and develops and conducts workshops for health care professionals, to promote clinician expertise in office spirometry and spirogram interpretation, and to increase everyone's awareness of the effects of smoking and the availability of smoking-cessation programs, support systems, and treatments. The American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC) has been a NLHEP partner from the beginning, and now those 2 organizations are adding another dimension to their partnership: AARC is going to take over all NLHEP administrative functions.