Awareness of tobacco control policies and anti-tobacco attitudes and behaviors among school personnel

Yin-Liang Tan; Zi-Yue Chen; Ya-Ping He; Gang Xu; Zhi-Ping Yu; Jing-Fen Zhu

doi:10.18332/tid/149926

Awareness of tobacco control policies and anti-tobacco attitudes and behaviors among school personnel

Tob Induc Dis. 2022 Jun 9:20:54. doi: 10.18332/tid/149926. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Yin-Liang Tan¹, Zi-Yue Chen¹, Ya-Ping He¹, Gang Xu¹, Zhi-Ping Yu², Jing-Fen Zhu¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Public Health, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
² Department of Nutrition and Dietetics, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, United States.

Abstract

Introduction: Adolescent smoking is a serious public health concern, and the role of personnel in reducing students'tobacco use has been proven. Anti-tobacco policies are strong factors for tobacco control but most are newly implemented in China. This study aimed to examine the awareness of anti-tobacco policies among school personnel in a southern city of China, and assess its influence on personnel's anti-tobacco attitudes and behaviors towards students.

Methods: An online cross-sectional study was conducted between September 2017 and January 2018 in schools of Shanghai, China. A total of 3194 subjects from 33 schools were selected by a two-stage stratified cluster randomized sampling design. Prevalence of anti-tobacco policy awareness is presented. Crude (ORs) and adjusted odds ratios (AORs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated to assess the association between policy awareness and anti-tobacco attitudes or behaviors.

Results: In all, 22.4% of surveyed participants knew four or five polices presented in the survey and 13.0% of personnel knew none of these policies. Most of the participants fully support prohibiting indoor (94.6%) and outdoor (86.3%) smoking in public places, bans on tobacco advertising (90.9%), and printing warning pictures on cigarette boxes (89.5%). Less than half of the personnel had taken action to stop students from smoking (45.7%), encourage students to quit smoking (42.4%) or participated in relevant educational activities held by schools (37.4%) in the previous year. The school personnel's anti-tobacco attitudes (AOR=1.28; 95% CI: 1.21-1.36) and behaviors (AOR=1.10; 95% CI: 1.03-1.17) were strengthened with increasing level of policy awareness.

Conclusions: The involvement of school personnel can be an important part of intervention to improve anti-tobacco campaigns on campus. The study calls for the implementation of projects or activities to improve anti-tobacco policy awareness in the school environment as part of school tobacco control strategy.

Keywords: adolescent health; school health; school personnel; smoke-free policy; smoking reduction.