WORLD JOURNAL OF ADVANCE
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH

*Saif Saad Salim, Noor Thaaer Mohammed and Asmaa Awaed Ahmed

ABSTRACT

Tobacco use is one of the major public health threats nowadays. Smoking can affect everybody organ. Healthprofessionals should play pivotal roles in tobacco control, and their attitude and practice toward tobacco use canaffect the health of the community.[38] Therefore, assessing and influencing physicians‘ attitudes and practice areone of the alternatives to reduce smoking prevalence in the community.[38] Accordingly, the present study wasconducted to describe the smoking behavior and attitude among workers in primary health care centers. Accordingto author knowledge, few studies are present in this respect in mosul city. So, this study may be very usefulreference for future evaluation of smoking status among workers in primary health care centers in mosul city. Thisstudy was conducted on smoking behaviors and attitudes among workers in six primary health care centers inMosul, three located in the right bank of Tigris river and three located in the left bank of Tigris river. This studywas conducted over a period of 6 months extending from 1/2/2020 to 1/8/2020.This is a descriptive cross sectionalstudy. The present study included all 340 workers (from both genders) working at these six primary health carecenters. A total of 316 workers returned the questionnaire with response rate of 93%. Data collection was donethrough using a self-administered questionnaire. The frequency of distribution of cigarette Smoking amongworkers primary health care centers was 24.62%. However; when stratified by gender, the frequency distributionamong male and female workers were 46.91% and 1.94% respectively. The mean number of cigarettes smokedper day was 24.1.The mean age of starting smoking of the current smokers was 21.1 years. The mean age at whichsmoking started and stopped for Ex-smoker were 20 and 33.5 years respectively. Prevalence of ex-smoker in thepresent study was 3.79% The highest percent of current smokers in the present study (41.7%) were in the agegroup 30-39 years, about 15% of current smokers in the present study were heavy smokers (smoke more than 20cigarettes per day), about 64.55% of current smoker had no plane to quit smoking in the next 6 months, about38% workers in primary health care centers who currently smoke in the present study attempted to quit smoking(for at least one week), less than 19% of currently smoking workers in primary health care centers in the presentstudy had smoked infront of the patients (16.45% sometimes and 2.53% often), about 91.7% of ex-smokers inprimary health care centers were daily smoker. The prevalence of waterpipe smoking among male workers inprimary health care centers (daily and occasional) in the present study was 27.17%. The prevalence of occasionalwaterpipe smoking among female workers in primary health care centers (6.49%). In general, most of workers inprimary health care centers hold a positive attitudes towards smoking with some significant differences between''current'' and ''never'' smokers where the current smokers were generally less likely to agree with statements thatwould change their current freedom to smoke.

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