Smoking status, affecting factors and passive smoking awareness levels of assistant doctors and nurses working at İnönü University Turgut Özal Medical Center

Introduction: Healthcare professionals have an important place in the fight against smoking. For this reason, it is important to determine the use of tobacco products in healthcare workers. There have been many studies on this subject in Turkey. In these studies, it was observed that smoking rates among healthcare workers were similar to the general population. Although the frequency of smoking in doctors has decreased, it is higher than doctors in other countries. With this study, it was aimed to determine the smoking status, affecting factors and passive smoking awareness levels of assistant doctors and nurses working in Turgut Özal Medical Center. Material and Method: This study was conducted on assistant doctors and nurses working at İnönü University Turgut Özal Medical Center between June and July 2020. The study is a cross-sectional study. 267 healthcare professionals were reached. The convenience sampling method, one of the improbable sampling methods, was used as the sampling method. The data collection tool consists of 3 parts; Sociodemographic and occupational questionnaire form, Questionnaire about smoking and passive smoking, Fagerstrom Nicotine Dependence Test. Chi-square test, Mann Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis tests were used in data analysis and p<0,05 was considered significant. Results: The prevalence of smoking in healthcare workers participating in our study is %24,3. Smoking rate is %22,7 for women and %26,5 for men. The prevalence of smoking in doctors is %17,2 and %30,3 in nurses. While the smoking rate is lower in internal sciences, it is higher in surgical sciences. It was found that %63,1 of the participants were low, %24,6 moderately and %12,3 highly dependent. %30,8 of smokers use tobacco products other than cigarettes. It was found that most of the pipe and wrapped cigarette in tobacco products. It was found that %89,1 of all participants were exposed to passive cigarette smoke in the workplace and %56,3 in the place where they live. %43,1 of smokers had a change in the amount of cigarettes smoked during the COVID-19 period. There was an overall decrease in cigarette consumption during the COVID-19 period. Conclusion: Smoking and passive smoking are high in healthcare workers. Strategies should be developed to make the declining trend in the COVID-19 pandemic period permanent. Keywords: COVID-19, Cigarette, Health worker