Abstract
Tobacco is a major preventable cause of premature morbidity and mortality. Health professionals are uniquely positioned to provide targeted interventions and should be empowered to provide cessation counselling that influence patient smoking. A cross-sectional national survey was administered to all third year students in four disciplines at the University of Malta. The Global Health Professional Student Survey (GHPSS) questionnaire was distributed to collect standardised demographic, smoking prevalence, behavioural, and attitudinal data. 81.9% completed the questionnaire (n = 173/211). A positive significant association between tobacco smoke exposure at home and current smoking status was identified. Non-smokers regarded anti-tobacco policies more favourably than smokers, being more likely to agree with banning of tobacco sales to adolescents (OR 3.6; 95% CI: 2.5–5.3; p ≤ 0.001); and with a smoking ban in all public places (OR 8.9; 95% CI: 6.1–13.1; p ≤ 0.001). Non-smokers favoured a role for health professionals in promoting smoking cessation (OR 5.1; 95% CI: 3.1–8.5; p ≤ 0.001). Knowledge of antidepressants as tools for smoking cessation was also associated with a perceived role for skilled health professionals in cessation counselling (OR 4.9; 95% CI: 1.8–13.3; p = 0.002). Smoking negatively influences beliefs and attitudes of students toward tobacco control. There is a need to adopt a standard undergraduate curriculum containing comprehensive tobacco prevention and cessation training to improve their effectiveness as role models.
Highlights
Tobacco use is one of the major preventable causes of premature death and disease in the World.The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that globally, over 1 billion people currently smoke tobacco [1]
While physician smoking prevalence in developed countries seems to have decreased over the past decades, this is not the case for several southern European countries and developing countries [7,8], where an expanding body of evidence shows that the prevalence of tobacco smoking is rather high in current health professional students [9,10,11,12]
The study population consisted of 211 students enrolled in their third year of study across the four undergraduate health professional schools
Summary
Very limited data on the smoking habits of Maltese health professionals/students had been collected previously, a EUROPREV self-reported survey in 2000 indicated that 12.8% of Maltese GPs were regular smokers [18], and a small study carried out in 2009 on a representative sample of Maltese doctors and medical students (n = 71) indicated a smoking prevalence of around 5% [19]. The aim of this survey was to assess whether smoking habits influenced Maltese health professional students’
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