Brief Tobacco Cessation Counselling: Mini Train-the-trainers Program

Physicians play a critical role in reducing tobacco use by advising smoking patients to quit. After receiving such advice to quit smoking, patients were more likely to report trying to quit, quitting for at least 24 hours, making more quit attempts, and having more successful quitting outcomes compared with those who received no such advice. On the other hand, most physicians are not performing smoking cessation counselling, and miss the opportunities to advise patients to quit smoking. One of the common reasons is the lack of time. Physicians are busy and cannot afford even one minute to advice their patients to quit smoking. Other barriers include lack of training and experience, lack of knowledge and skills, no awareness about the benefits and effects of physicians' advice, no incentives and no support or requirement from hospital management that they have to do it. We designed a brief smoking cessation counselling model (AWARD) which takes only 10-20 seconds. We will train the physicians to perform the AWARD cessation counselling model in clinic, and encourage them to participate in our brief smoking cessation intervention project using the randomized controlled trail (RCT) design and to train more peer physicians to perform brief smoking cessation counseling. We propose to investigate the effect of the training program on physicians' knowledge of tobacco cessation, practice of performing cessation counselling, and attitudes toward tobacco control policies.