Within alcohol and other drug (AOD) services, staff attitudes and beliefs are important influences determining provision of smoking cessation care. This study of AOD staff aimed to examine: a) current attitudes toward smoking cessation care; b) service and staff characteristics associated with unsupportive smoking cessation care attitudes, and c) perceived barriers to providing smoking cessation care.
Between July-October 2014, 506 staff from 31 Australian AOD services completed an online cross-sectional survey which assessed agreement with 6 attitudinal statements (supportive and unsupportive) and 10 perceived barriers to smoking cessation care in the AOD setting. Logistic regressions examined service (sector) and staff (age, gender, smoking status and number of years in AOD field) characteristics associated with unsupportive smoking cessation care attitudes.
A large proportion agreed with supportive statements: Smoking cessation care should be part of usual care (87%), smoking cessation care is as important as counselling about other drugs (72%) and staff have the organisational support to provide smoking cessation care (58%). Some respondents agreed with unsupportive statements: AOD clients are not interested in addressing their smoking (40%), increasing smoking restrictions would lead to client aggression (23%), smoking is a personal choice and it is not the service's role to interfere (16%). Respondents from non-government managed services, current tobacco smokers (compared to ex-smokers) and those with less AOD experience had higher odds of agreeing with unsupportive smoking cessation care statements. The most frequently identified barriers to providing smoking cessation care were: client inability to afford cessation medicines, insufficient funding and lack of a coordinated treatment approach (all 61%).
Overall, staff hold largely supportive smoking cessation care attitudes but perceive a large number of barriers to providing smoking cessation care.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 27 November 2017.
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#9,655,033
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Outputs from Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy
#522
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#130,212
of 332,510 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy
#12
of 18 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,209,962 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 42nd percentile – i.e., 42% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
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