The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: To assess the main epidemiological parameters of tobacco use among Romanian health professionals (HPs).

Methods: A questionnaire with 21 questions was distributed in 19 from 41 counties of Romania, to HPs (30178 persons). They were asked if they smoked daily in the last month ("daily smoker") or only occasionally ("occasional smoker"), if they smoked more than 100 cig but not in the last year ("former smoker") or if they smoked less than 100 cig or none ("never smoker"). According to this classification, different parameters were calculated.

Results: From the total persons who answered to the questionnaire, 57.4% are non-smokers, 9.2% former smokers, 23.7% daily smokers and 8.5% occasional smoker, and more males than females are daily smokers (32.8% versus 21.6%). HPs from the emergency services are smoking most (29.3%) compared with HPs from county hospitals (23.8%), municipal hospitals (21.5%) and one-specialty hospital (25.1%). From the total smokers, 70.9% do know that smoking is a disease, and only 36.6% intend to quit in the next 6 months. There is no difference between men and women in the intention to quit. From the 10.7% of all doctors who do not advice patients to quit, 33% are current smokers. Conclusions. Efforts must be made to educate HPs (especially from the emergency departments), to enforce the tobacco-free hospital policy, to create incentives in order to convince more HPs to quit.