Smoking - related behaviour and attitudes among medical students in Alexandria

As a preliminary step toward incorporating a tobacco education and intervention program into our undergraduate medical curriculum, this study was designed to assess students smoking-related behaviour, knowledge and attitudes towards tobacco, and perceptions of their future role as doctors in smoking intervention. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the university year 2001/2002 on a representative sample of male medical students enrolled in 4[th] and 5[th] years at Alexandria University. A total of 320 students across the 2 years completed the survey. The smoking rate among medical students was 17.5% [10.9% smoked daily and 66% occasionally]. The awareness of harmful effects of smoking and knowledge about the causal role of tobacco in the development of specific diseases were deficient. The intention to perform smoking intervention in the future as doctors seemed unsatisfactory. About 85% of the students thought that doctors should carry out smoking cessation advice depending on the disease, while the rate of those who thought so irrespective of the disease did not reach 44%. Current smokers thought less actively about smoking intervention than non-smokers. Nearly two-thirds of students [65.3%] felt they were not sufficiently prepared for caring or counseling smokers, and only 31.9% of students were convinced of the effectiveness of the doctor's advice to stop smoking. Seventy-seven and half percent of them desired specific training in smoking intervention. Non-smokers were more in favour of legislative actions to discourage tobacco use than current smokers. These findings suggest that medical school authorities should design and implement an appropriate basic training aimed at better preparing medical students for their future role in prevention of smoking. Specific teaching of medical students about smoking-related diseases and a patient-centered smoking cessation intervention is required to provide future medical practitioners with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively intervene with smokers

Mental health knowledge and skills among preschool nurseries staff in Alexandria and the effect of an in - service training programme

Day care centres and kindergartens have potential effects on children's physical, social and mental developments. The present study was carried out to assess the knowledge and skills of nurseries' staff in Alexandria as regard child mental health, and to evaluate the outcome of an in-service child mental health training programme. For this purpose 10% of the registered nurseries in Alexandria were selected by the stratified random sampling technique using proportional allocation [n=54] to represent the six districts of Alexandria. Data were collected from all staff members of selected nurseries present during the visits to the nurseries [n=172]. A self-administered questionnaire was used and including general information about the respondents, and their knowledge and skills regarding child mental health. From the total sample, 52 were randomly selected to attend a 2-day in-service mental health training programme. Results of the study revealed deficiency of knowledge and skills of the staff in most of the tested items. However staff who were graduates of Faculties of Kindergarten, Education and Arts were significantly better than other educational categories regarding the number of correct or partially correct answers. The training programme proved to cause a significant improvement in knowledge and skills of the staff in most of the items. It was recommended to increase the staff who have educational background of kindergarten and education, to give more attention to continuous evaluation of nurseries staff knowledge and skills, and to apply a maintained system of pre and in-service child mental health training programmes for them