The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: The Romanian Ministry of Health develops a one-year campaign "Health Professionals against tobacco". The objective of this survey (the first stage of the campaign) is the evaluation of the needs for a policy concerning the health professionals (HPs).

Methods: We used a questionnaire with 21 questions about knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding tobacco use, distributed to all HPs from the main hospitals. At this moment, we have results from 19 counties (from a total of 41) – 30178 persons (mean age: 40.45+9.9 years; female/male ratio: 4.27).

Results: From the total, 23.7% are daily smokers and 8.5% are occasional smokers, with a predominance of males (32.8% of men are daily smokers versus 21.6% of women). Only 76.4% HPs know that smoking is classified as a disease, and only 67.8% admit that they recommend always to smokers to quit (meanwhile, 10.7% recognise that they never advise smokers to quit). Regarding the intention to quit, only 36.6% from the daily smokers declare that they intend to quit in the next 6 months – the sex ratio is practically the same (35.1% men and 35.4% women). There are calculated other parameters, too. Conclusions. The prevalence of smoking among HPs isn't as important as we knew from previous studies. The main needs of a policy about tobacco control for HPs are: offering knowledge, developing measures to increase the willingness to quit, enforcing HPs to address incentives to quit to their patients, enforcing the legislation for smoke-free medical care units.