Smoking prevalence, attitudes and behaviors of primary healthcare providers and its impact on their smoking cessation counseling practices

Abstract

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.

Prevalence and intensity of smoking among healthcare workers and their attitude and behavior towards smoking cessation in the western region of Saudi Arabia: A Cross-sectional study

“…Cessation 2018;4(August):30 https://doi.org/10.18332/tpc/93787 frontline of healthcare provision and that they are expected to contribute to solve this public issue 4 . In Arab countries, some studies measured the prevalence of smoking among HCWs and some of these countries showed higher percentages of smokers in the healthcare sectors compared to others [5][6][7][8][9] . In the KSA, the overall prevalence of smoking among HCWs ranges from 15 to 34%.…”

Readiness of Accredited Social Health Activist Workers for Tobacco Cessation Counseling after a Brief Intervention in Odisha, India: A Quasi-experimental Study

“…The results of this study showed that at baseline, for almost all the belief items, only less than half of the study population showed positive beliefs, while after the brief intervention, a marked and significant increase was seen in the proportion of subjects having positive beliefs. In a cross-sectional study conducted by Al-Hosani et al 10 in Saudi Arabia, more than half of primary health-care workers showed positive belief. This difference could be due to the fact that in that study, the study population majorly comprised doctors and nurses working in primary health centers, while in the present study, the assessment was made on ASHA workers.…”

“…12 The attitudes and behavior toward tobacco cessation counseling among the primary health-care providers were all adequately assessed by this questionnaire. 10 Furthermore, a pilot study validated the appropriateness, clarity, and comprehensiveness of the questionnaires. A high degree of privacy was ensured to all the participants by keeping the survey anonymous, to encourage participation and honest answers.…”

“…Health-care providers at the primary care level like accredited social health activist (ASHA) workers and village health guides, in particular, are considered as community leaders and role models. 10 An accredited social health activist is a female community health worker usually selected from the village where she has to work. She is trained for ensuring people's access to health-care services, developing improved health-care practices and behaviors and health-care provisions as is essential and feasible at the grassroots level.…”

Empowering healthcare providers through smoking cessation training in Malaysia: a preintervention and postintervention evaluation on the improvement of knowledge, attitude and self-efficacy

“…Several barriers to intervention have been discussed including lack of knowledge, negative healthcare providers’ attitude, low self-efficacy, lack of training,20 competing priorities and believing that counselling was not an appropriate service,21 barriers of time, manpower and finance, lack of skills, concern for the clinician-patient relationship, and perception of insufficient patient motivation 22. Smoking among healthcare providers is also prevalent in many countries, and those who smoked were less likely to advise patients to stop smoking 23. Healthcare providers also claimed that they lack knowledge in smoking cessation counselling techniques and confidence in the smoking cessation programme 24.…”