Prevalence of tobacco use and perceptions of student health professionals about cessation training: results from Global Health Professions Student Survey

Introduction: Health professionals who use tobacco may be deterred from providing cessation advice and counseling to their patients. We aimed to provide prevalence estimates of tobacco use among student health professionals and describe their attitudes towards tobacco cessation training. Methods: Country-wise aggregate data from the Global Health Professions Student Survey (GHPSS) on ‘current cigarette smoking’ (smoking cigarettes on one or more days during past 30 days), and ‘current use of tobacco products other than cigarettes’ (chewing tobacco, snuff, bidis, cigars, or pipes one or more days during the past 30 days) were analysed. For each World Health Organisation (WHO) regions, we estimated mean prevalence rates of tobacco use weighted by the population of sampling frame and aggregate proportions for ‘health professionals’ role’ and ‘cessation training’ indicators using ‘metaprop’ command on stata 11. Results: A total of 107,527 student health professionals participated in 236 s...