School Nurses Helpful in Making Students Quit Smoking

According to a recent study in the United States, counseling sessions with the school nurses can be very helpful in making high school students especially boys quit smoking. The team of researchers studied about 1000 teenage students who said they wished to quit smoking. The research team wrote in the Journal named ‘Pediatrics’ that about 11% of the teenagers who were counseled for a period of about three months had stopped smoking. While among those who received only pamphlets with educational content only 6% teens had quit smoking. The author of the study was Lori Pbert. He is from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

Dr. Lori Pbert said, “A school nurse-delivered smoking-cessation intervention proved feasible and effective in improving short-term abstinence among adolescent boys and short-term reductions in smoking amount and frequency in both genders.” But it was observed that after a year of attending the counseling sessions no difference in smoking rates was observed among the teens who received different types of assistance. In every five teen about one said that they did not smoke recently. Michael Siegel, who is currently studying, tobacco control at the Boston University School of Public health, said, “It’s nice that there was some effect at three months, what we really care about is sustained cessation. The overwhelming majority of these kids are not quitting.” Michael was not involved in the current study.

The study covered 35 schools in Massachusetts. In these schools half the school nurses were trained to provide their students with one—on—one counseling which was based upon goal setting and problem solving. It also included a plan as to how to quit smoking and how to prevent it from relapsing. The other half of the nurses were asked to give their students pamphlets with information related to quitting smoking. They also volunteered to answer any queries that the students had. Both the group of school nurses met their students once a week. The session had the time duration of 10 to 30 minutes.

The intervention of counseling proved to be especially beneficial for boys in the short run. Those students who had set their goals and kept a track of the progress they made were three times more likely to stop smoking than the other boys. Experts of smoking cessation said that the biggest obstacle at any age was to relapse into smoking and this was especially very prominent in teens.