Background: Despite the great efforts done by the government, there has been an increase in the number of people adopting smoking habit, among them health care professionals. Objectives: The aims of this work are 1) to assess the attitudes, behaviors, and risk perceptions among primary health care providers in the ambulatory health services in Abu Dhabi towards smoking and 2) to assess the impact of their smoking status on their practices of smoking counseling. Rationale: The justification of the research was that it provides an understanding on the influence of the smoking behaviour of health care providers and their eventual service delivery especially counselling smoking patients. Subjects and Methods: Self-administered descriptive questionnaires were used to collect data. They were distributed to doctors and nurses who consented to participate and the filled questionnaires were collected in sealed envelopes. Out of 137 health care professionals who were approached, 122 responded (participation rate of 89 %). 47% were physicians and 53% were nurses. Results: The results showed that, among the studied group the rate of smoking was 8.3 % with influence from friends being cited as the greatest contributing factor. Cigarette smoking was used by the 87.5% of the participants and 25% used "Shisha". Irrespective of its adverse effects, most of healthcare providers have a positive attitude towards smoking cessation policy. An inadequacy in training these personnel on how to counsel their patients with regard to smoking cessation. Conclusion: A pre-service as well as continuous smoking cessation training is needed in order to change the attitude of the primary health care providers and enhance their counselling techniques.

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Introduction: Modifiable health behaviors have the power to increase (or decrease) the risk of chronic diseases, impacting a population’s health and life span. Health and wellness programs can potentially play a major role in initiating and supporting positive changes in health behaviors, which may lead to improving an individual’s health span and reducing the risk of premature mortality. A better understanding of the health and well-being status of the population is crucial to the design of proper and effective interventions. This study aimed to describe the health and well-being status of a cohort of 123 employees in the United Arab Emirates. Methods and analysis: This study reports the demographic characteristics, body composition, cardiovascular fitness, functional fitness, biological age, and well-being of 123 employees from a large health sector company enrolled in a workplace wellness study in the United Arab Emirates. Employees were invited to participate in an intervention that was designed to validate the efficacy of weekly health and wellness challenges. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the employees' distribution. Results: The mean age of participants was 39.2 years old, 80% of them were non-Emirati, and the majority were from Middle-Eastern and South Asian ethnicities. The prevalence of overweight, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, hyperlipidemia, prediabetes, diabetes was 35%, 29%, 34%, 79%, 30%, 7%, respectively. Almost half of the participants (47%) were prehypertensive for systolic blood pressure, 80% had fitness category of poor-very poor, and majority (60%) reported exercising <150 minutes/week. The mean functional fitness score was 12.2 points, which indicated an increased risk of injury with physical activity. Conclusions: The findings of this study suggest that despite the advancements in healthcare in the UAE, several key preventable risk factors are still prevalent in its population. The introduction of health and wellness programs can support healthier lifestyles to achieve improvements in quality of life and health expectancy among the UAE population.