| This cross-sectional survey research aimed to determine the smoking behaviors and attitudes toward smoking cessation of health care professionals and academic staff. This study involved 1,412 male subjects who worked in various schools and hospitals of the 14th region of the ministry of public health. The result revealed that 21.1% of the subjects were smokers. The overall level of attitudes toward the hazard of smoking among the subjects is good with the mean score of 4.24 (from a total score of 5). Their attitudes toward the economic impact domain were higher than those on the social, work performance and health impact domains, respectively. The item that had the lowest score was “One cannot know when one will die; how could one believe that one will die sooner?” The result also demonstrated that the overall level of attitudes toward the hazards of smoking of the health care professionals were significantly higher than that of the academic staff (p-value < 0.001). In addition, the result showed that the level of attitudes toward the hazards of smoking of the non-smoker subjects were higher than those of the smoker subjects with statistical significance (p-value < 0.001). Furthermore, it was found that the factors of education, job position, marital status, income, family economic status, family relation, alcohol drinking and being surrounded by smokers were related to smoking behavior with statistical significance (p-value < 0.05), whereas the factors of occupation, age and number of children were not related to the subjects’ smoking behavior. It was found that most of the smokers were psychologically addicted, but the level of nicotine addiction was low. For the attitudes toward smoking cessation among smokers, the health care professionals had a significantly higher level of attitudes toward smoking cessation than that of the academic staff (p-value = 0.016).
The analysis of the relationship between the attitudes toward the hazards of smoking and population characteristics yielded that the attitude level of the health care professionals was significantly related to the factors of job position, number of children, smoking behavior, alcohol drinking and being surrounded by smokers (p-value < 0.05), while the attitude level of the academic staff was significantly related to the factors of economic status, smoking behavior and alcohol drinking (p-value < 0.05). In addition, the level of attitudes toward the hazards of smoking of the health care professionals who smoke was significantly related to the factors of age (p-value = 0.012), while that of the academic staff who smoke was significantly correlated to job position (p-value = 0.001). Moreover, the analysis of the relationship between the attitudes toward smoking cessation and population characteristics revealed that the factors of age, education, number of children and stress were significantly correlated to the attitudes toward smoking cessation of the health care professionals who smoke, while all the variables in all the factors had no relation to those of the academic staff who smoke. |