No abstract

Background: Despite the great efforts done by the government, there has been an increase in the number of people adopting smoking habit, among them health care professionals. Objectives: The aims of this work are 1) to assess the attitudes, behaviors, and risk perceptions among primary health care providers in the ambulatory health services in Abu Dhabi towards smoking and 2) to assess the impact of their smoking status on their practices of smoking counseling. Rationale: The justification of the research was that it provides an understanding on the influence of the smoking behaviour of health care providers and their eventual service delivery especially counselling smoking patients. Subjects and Methods: Self-administered descriptive questionnaires were used to collect data. They were distributed to doctors and nurses who consented to participate and the filled questionnaires were collected in sealed envelopes. Out of 137 health care professionals who were approached, 122 responded (participation rate of 89 %). 47% were physicians and 53% were nurses. Results: The results showed that, among the studied group the rate of smoking was 8.3 % with influence from friends being cited as the greatest contributing factor. Cigarette smoking was used by the 87.5% of the participants and 25% used "Shisha". Irrespective of its adverse effects, most of healthcare providers have a positive attitude towards smoking cessation policy. An inadequacy in training these personnel on how to counsel their patients with regard to smoking cessation. Conclusion: A pre-service as well as continuous smoking cessation training is needed in order to change the attitude of the primary health care providers and enhance their counselling techniques.