Perceptions of Health Care Workers in Prince Salman Hospital in Riyadh City to current anti-tobacco pictorial warning labels May, 2013: A Cross Sectional Study
The prevalence of smoking in Saudi is approximately 17.5% among adults, but is particularly high among males . Since the health warnings on cigarette packages have been recognized as important and cost effective health communication strategies. Thus, plans to enhance health warnings is a substantial and positive move in Saudi tobacco control efforts, and establishes it as one of the earlier countries in the Middle East to use a selection of health pictorial warnings. The objectives of the study were to evaluate the effectiveness of the three current health warnings on a sample of adults wither they are smoker or non smoker and its effect regarding promoting positive health behavior change Among the participants regarding perceptions of salience, fear elicitation and gained information.
Methodology
A cross-sectional study was conducted on a Prince Salman general hospital at Riyadh city during month of May, 2013. Of sample size (704 ) divided into four strata regarding 4 categories of healthcare workers at hospital( physicians. , Nurses, Administrators , Allied Health Careers) as single strata and random samples are then taken separately from each strata with use of list of HCWs who work at each strata which then select Randomly . The self-administration questioners were distribution and recollected.
Results
Out of (704) participants in our study were questioned (56.0%) were females and (44.0%) were males. Most of the study sample were Saudi (63.6%) and 36.4% were non-Saudi. The mean age was 32.03 ± 7.87 years (range 22 to 59) and 20.1 %.( regular or occasional) smoker and 79.9 % non smoker. The result also showed no more respondents perceived current pictorials as salient and fear-eliciting compared to each other except there were significant differences in information added between current pictorials among non smoker but overall proportions reporting informative were generally less than 50%.(33.9%) . Furthermore, the picture of pregnant women smoking and fetus motivated significantly more smokers to consider quitting overall proportion of smokers reporting motivation was 41.4%. Among nonsmokers, the picture of hand burning motivated significantly more of them to consider that they will not start smoke and overall proportion of non-smokers reporting motivation was 67.7%.
Conclusion
The pictorial health warning was effective to ward positive attitude to remain not smoking. Otherwise it was not effective as it should be among both group smokers and non-smokers. It has demonstrated the need of more research on the health pictorial warning prior to release in market to succeed in achieving the objectives and purpose of it.