The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: Acting as role models in tobacco control has been widely accepted as the responsibility of medical staff. However a sample survey held by China Disease Control released that the smoking rate among medical staff was as high as 45% in six cities, and they had very limited knowledge on how bad smoking was for one's health. How was the current status of tobacco smoking and tobacco-cessation of medical staff in Shanghai?

Methods: To address these questions, a-city-wide survey was conducted in August 2005, some 47,902 staff from 237 hospitals attended this survey, and EPINFOR 6 software was used in data analysis process.

Results: Results indicated that the smoking rate of medical staff was13%, in which 95.4% of smokers were male staff while 3.9% were female. Profession-based analysis result showed that administrative staff had the highest smoking rate (26.5%), followed by surgeons, technicians, internists and nurses with the smoking rates being 23.1%, 16.1%, 12.6%, 0.5%, respectively. Although 93.8% of medical staffs realized that they should strongly suggest smoking patients to quit smoking and provide patients with tobacco cessation services, and 67.1% of them answered that providing tobacco cessation service would not affect diagnosis and medical treatment of diseases, the truth was that 83.8% of staff had not gotten any training on tobacco cessation service and could not help their patients on this effectively. Survey results revealed that 56.6% of medical staff had never provided their patients with tobacco cessation advice, and 41.4% of them even didn't know how to advise smoking patients to quit smoking.