![Sample our Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing & Allied Health journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5944/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Medicine-Dentistry-Nursing-Allied-Health.jpg"})
Abstract
Objectives: To observe if general practitioners change their smoking behaviour after participating in a smoking cessation intervention for their patients.
Methods: A large sample of general practitioners in the Provence—Alpes—Côte d'Azur region of France were surveyed about their opinions and reported practices concerning prevention both for their patients and in their own personal lives. Randomly chosen areas were designated as intervention or control; 746 GPs randomly chosen equally from among identified smokers (nequals;371) and non-smokers (nequals;375) living in the intervention areas were asked to participate in a minimal smoking cessation intervention with their patients. Doctors in the control area were not offered this possibility. One year after the patient intervention, 260 smoking doctors from the intervention areas and 211 from the control areas were again surveyed about their opinions and reported practices concerning prevention.
Results: Among the 471 GPs, 21.7% reported having stopped smoking between the first and the second surveys. Results between the intervention and control groups were not significantly different, but the overall cessation rate was almost three times higher than the cessation reported at the first survey (8.3% of the surveyed GPs had stopped smoking within the year preceding the first survey).
Conclusions: No effect on GP smoking was found among those who were offered the possibility of participating in a minimal smoking cessation for their patients as compared with control GP smokers. However, the results suggest that the influence of the general social environment against smoking was reinforced by the very fact that the GPs took a position on prevention at the occasion of the survey; smoking measured among the general population of GPs in national surveys did not decrease in this same period. Eur J Gen Pract 1996; 2: 58–61.