The study was conducted to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of physicians regarding smoking to develop a program to control smoking in this group while utilizing this force actively in smoking cessation program.
Methodology
A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Makkah governorate, using a self-administered, structured questionnaire covering information about knowledge, attitude and practices of physicians regarding smoking along with their demographic background. After stratifying the study population on basis of health sector and type of health facility, physicians were sampled using stratified cluster sampling technique. As the response from different strata was not uniform weighted statistics were used throughout the analysis.
Results
A total of 1290 physicians participated in the study, 79.5% males and 20.5% females with only 14.3% Saudi nationals. 7.0% respondents claimed to smoke cigarette regularly, 7.9% occasionally, 10.8% have quit smoking and 74.4% never smoked. Males smoke significantly more than females, but there was no effect of age, type and urban/rural location of health facility. Arab physicians smoked cigarette more than non-Arabs. 6.2% of physicians smoked shisha, 5.4% smoked cigar, 1.7% smoked pipe, 0.9% ate it with betel quid, 0.7% chewed it alone, 0.5% smoked Bidi, 0.4% use oral snuff and 0.1% use nasal snuff. Shisha is mainly restricted to Egyptians and Saudis. Overall tobacco use was 23.0%, while tobacco smoking was 22.4%. There was a strong correlation between current cigarette use and other tobacco smoking. Overall knowledge and attitude of physicians regarding health effects of smoking, role of health professionals and smoking control strategies was good with some weakness in knowledge about effects of passive smoking. However, knowledge of smokers was significantly higher than non-smokers. 46.2% of the physicians work in places without any smoke-free policy, 7.3% worked in facilities where smoking rooms were available, and 46.5% worked in facilities where smoking was not allowed. Only 3.0% physicians were trained in smoking cessation approaches.
Conclusion
There is a need of extensive training program for the physicians for their own health education and cessation program counseling while focusing on recently established effects of passive smoking and smoking during pregnancy.