Smoking behavior of primary care physicians and its effect on their smoking counseling practice

Context: Smoking among the primary care physicians (PCPs) is detrimental to not only their own health but it may also affect their attitude and practice towards smoking cessation counseling. Aims: We aimed to assess the smoking behavior of primary care physicians and its effect on their patient smoking counseling practices. Subjects and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among the primary care physicians (N = 261) working under the Ministry of Health in Riyadh city, Saudi Arabia during May to June 2018. The data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire that was based on global adult tobacco survey. The participants were selected through simple random sampling. Results: About 16% of PCPs were found to be current smokers while about 9.6% were ex-smokers. On binomial logistic regression current smoking was observed to be independently associated with gender, specialty, and years of work experience (P < 0.01). The practice of smoking cessation advice was found to be significantly associated with physicians' current smoking status after adjusting for other factors; PCPs who were non-smokers were 2.97 (95% CI 1.34-6.54) times more likely to always advice patients on cessation as compared to smoking colleagues. Conclusions and Implications: Smoking behavior of physicians was found to affect their patient smoking cessation counseling. This finding should be used in while planning and training staff for smoking cessation services in primary care settings.