• Chandrashekhar T Sreeramareddy, N Ramakrishnareddy, Mahbubur Rahman, and Imtiyaz Ali Mir.
• Department of Community Medicine, International Medical University, Bukit Jalil, Malaysia.
• BMJ Open. 2018 May 26; 8 (5): e017477.

IntroductionHealth professionals play an important role in providing advice to their patients about tobacco prevention and cessation. Health professionals who use tobacco may be deterred from providing cessation advice and counselling to their patients. We aimed to provide prevalence estimates of tobacco use among student health professionals and describe their attitudes towards tobacco cessation training.MethodsCountry-wise aggregate data from the Global Health Professions Student Survey on 'current cigarette smoking' (smoking cigarettes on 1 or more days during the past 30 days), and 'current use of tobacco products other than cigarettes' (chewing tobacco, snuff, bidis, cigars or pipes, 1 or more days during the past 30 days) were analysed. For each WHO region, we estimated mean prevalence rates of tobacco use weighted by the population of the sampling frame and aggregate proportions for 'health professionals' role' and 'cessation training' indicators using 'metaprop' command on Stata V.11.ResultsA total of 107 527 student health professionals participated in 236 surveys done in four health profession disciplines spanning 70 countries with response rates ranging from 40% to 100%. Overall, prevalence of smoking was highest in European countries (20% medical and 40% dental students) and the Americas (13% pharmacy to 23% dental students). Other tobacco use was higher in eastern Mediterranean (10%-23%) and European countries (7%-13%). In most WHO regions, ≥70% of the students agreed that health professionals are role models, and have a role in advising about smoking cessation to their patients and the public. Only ≤33% of all student health professionals in most WHO regions (except 80% dental students in the Eastern Mediterranean region) had received formal training on smoking cessation approaches and ≥80% of all students agreed that they should receive formal cessation training.ConclusionsTobacco control should take place together with medical educators to discourage tobacco use among student health professionals and implement an integrated smoking cessation training into health professions' curricula.© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2018. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted.

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