GOAL III: HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
Health care professionals will have up-to-date knowledge and skills pertaining to spit tobacco and will use these skills with increased frequency to provide quality prevention and cessation education and services.
(note: evaluation activities are included in Goal I)
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Objective
A: Increase the knowledge, enhance the skills, and improve the
practices of health care professionals regarding spit tobacco education,
prevention, and cessation. |
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A physician's advice to stop smoking has been cited by smokers as a
critical motivator for attempting to quit smoking.[7-9] However, only half
of smokers report ever having been asked about their smoking status or
advised to quit by health professionals.[10-12] The importance of medical
advice in motivating smokers to quit smoking suggests that medical
intervention is likely to be an important motivator to stop spit tobacco
use as well. Furthermore, in today's team-oriented health care settings,
educating the entire health care team to advise and assist patients to
avoid tobacco use is the best strategy to assure that appropriate tobacco
invention occurs.
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Desired
Results:
Strategy
1: Increase the availability and accessibility of affordable
educational offerings for health care professionals which are designed to
address spit tobacco education, epidemiology, health effects, user
identification, risk groups, and prevention and cessation strategies and
services.
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Evaluation from Goal I will guide the development of educational seminars
which address the needs of each health care professional group.
Information on spit tobacco could be incorporated into existing seminars
or expanded into stand-alone seminars. Seminars could also be
multidisciplinary; e.g., the collaborative program developed by the Nurse
Oncology Education Program, the Dental
Oncology Education Program, and the Dietitian Oncology Nutrition Education
Program which focuses on tobacco, nutrition, and oral cancer.
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Strategy
2: Implement a train-the-trainer initiative for health care
professionals to disseminate spit tobacco prevention and cessation
education to youth and adult influencers.
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Providing spit tobacco education through a train-the-trainer approach will
yield far-reaching results. Education would be provided to physicians,
dentists, and nurses who would agree to provide spit tobacco education to
others. Trainers could be health care professionals in practice or faculty
members at teaching institutions who could influence their students.
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Strategy
3: Reduce spit tobacco use among health care professionals to
improve their effectiveness as adult influencers in providing quality
prevention and cessation education and services.
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In a survey of physicians and dentists who treated adolescent patients,
practitioners who had never used tobacco reported counseling adolescents
on the dangers of tobacco more frequently than practitioners who
themselves were users.[13] This finding suggests that reducing spit tobacco
use among health care professionals may be extremely beneficial in
affecting change in patients.
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Objective
B: Increase the level of competency of health care professional
students in spit tobacco education, user identification, prevention, and
cessation. |
A survey of senior dental students at three Texas dental schools found
that 57% reported having tobacco-use cessation programs, 25% had been
instructed in nicotine replacement therapy, and only 14% had received
actual training in tobacco-use cessation.[14] Although all students had not
been instructed in these areas, 85% of the students planned to provide
these services following graduation.
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In a survey of advanced practice nurses, 71% of the respondents indicated that they were familiar with tobacco cessation counseling techniques and 23% desired training. A survey of general nurses showed that only 20% reported a high skill level in smoking prevention and tobacco cessation counseling. However, a mere 22% identified a strong need for tobacco prevention and cessation training.[15] These results imply that many nurses have not felt a need for incorporating tobacco cessation into their practice. Desired
Results:
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Strategy
1: Assess the spit tobacco content in curricula of dental,
medical, and nurse training programs.
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There is very little data available with regard to what is being taught at
the undergraduate level on spit tobacco. One survey found that only 22% of
the textbooks in dental and medical schools mentioned spit tobacco, and
although 100% of the patient history forms used in those institutions
included questions regarding smoking, only 12% included spit tobacco
questions.[16] Rankin et al. recently published the results of a survey of
senior dental students reporting their perceived competency levels in oral
cancer diagnosis-related tasks.[14] A similar survey approach could be
employed to determine the perceptions of dental, medical, and nursing
school undergraduates in regard to their own preparedness to deal with
spit tobacco-related issues following graduation.
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CATCHUM is a consortium of the eight medical schools of Texas dedicated to the education of undergraduate medical students in prevention and screening of cancer. It is housed in The University of Texas Medical Branch Educational Cancer Center and is currently funded by the National Cancer Institute. This project would be willing to share methodology and expertise for obtaining desired information from medical schools. Strategy
2: Address spit tobacco content deficiencies in curricula of
dental, medical, and nurse training programs.
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