The effectiveness of a smoking cessation program for students, Chiangrai Province

Abstract

The aim of this action research was to study the effectiveness of the modified smoking cessation program for smoking students in Chiangrai Province. This program was developed from the Smoking Cessation Guideline in 2007 by a hospital in Chiangrai Province based on the concepts and theories relating to smoking cessation clinic in hospital Chiang Mai Drug Dependence Treatment Center and clinical practice guideline in smoking cessation including other related literature. This modified program consisted of 20 activities in 6 weeks. The follow-up activities were made in the 1st, 3rd, and 6th month after the intervention. There were 325 smoking students of grades 7-12 from the sampled 20 high schools. Data were collected before and after the program and analyzed by employing descriptive statistics.

The results were as follows: Most of smoking student were males(97%), aged between 6- 17 years with the average of 15.7 years. Most of the samples were in grade 9 and started smoking at the age of 14-15 years (41.3%). The motive to start smoking was curiosity. The average number of cigarette smoked per day was 2-3 cigarettes. After participating in the modified program, there were 180 smoking students decreased smoking(55.4%), 78 smoking students quit smoking(24.0%) and 59 smoking students still smoked the same number of cigarettes(18.2%). The follow-up activities made on the 1 st, 3rd, and 6th month after the intervention showed that the decreased percentages smoking were 52.3, 56.6 and 52.6 respectively while the percentages of those who quit smoking were 23.4, 24.6 and 30.5 respectively.

In conclusion, the results showed that this modified smoking cessation program were effective in helping high school smoking students to decrease and quit smoking. However it was suggested that some smoking cessation activities, for example organizing anti-smoking campaigning in school, visit patients with hazardous effects of cigarette smoking, setting an activity to follow-up the students who participated the program at least once a month. Besides, expert therapists of a smoking cessation program should also be considered including the improvement of contents and teaching materials of the curriculum. After the improvement of the teaching materials had been done in accordance with the recommendations of the public health personal, teachers, and the samples, they should be applied in training of teachers working in a smoking cessation program for smoking students in the future.