Tobacco Abuse among Support Staff and Effectiveness of Planned Teaching Programme in Terms of Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Tobacco Abuse

Tobacco is one of the most widely abused drugs in the world making it leading cause of preventable death. A two-phase study was done to identify the prevalence of tobacco abuse and to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of planned teaching programme in terms of knowledge, attitude and practice among the support staff in a selected hospital in New Delhi. During phase-I of the study, 200 support staff were selected based on total enumeration sampling technique. Structured tools containing socio-demographic variables, prevalence assessment tool, knowledge questionnaire, attitude scale, and practice scale were administered as a pre-test. During phase-II of the study, administration of the planned teaching programme was done for all the 200 support staff. A post-test was conducted for 66 tobacco abusers identifi ed during phase-I of the study based on the prevalence. The study results revealed that the prevalence rate of tobacco abuse among the support staff was 33 percent. Out of this 33 percent of the tobacco abusers, 26.5 percent were smokeless tobacco users and 6 percent were smoking tobacco abusers. The mean difference of pre-test and post-test knowledge, attitude, and practice scores were found out to be 2.95, 1.99, and 0.69 respectively. The planned teaching programme was effective in increasing the knowledge score of the tobacco abusers but there was no effect of PTP on attitude and practice score. The demographic variables such as age, sex, gender, educational qualifi cation, marital status, and monthly income were found to be signifi cantly associated with tobacco abuse among the support staff