Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2-2008

Abstract

Smoking represents a serious public health burden that crosses gender, racial, and socioeconomic lines. Although the majority of smoking cessation counseling traditionally occurs in the setting of a Primary Care Providers office, clinicians often lack the necessary time and/or cultural and language skills to provide adequate help to smokers prepared to quit. A Community Health Worker (CHW) smoking cessation project utilizing CHWs in San Diego, CA evaluated by Woodruff, et al effectively increased patient's abstinence rates in the intervention group. A similar project undertaken by the University of New Mexico Department of Family and Community Medicine employed bilingual CHWs to counsel patients regarding smoking cessation in a clinic with both Spanish and English-speaking patients. This study analyzes the differences in CHW counseling time required (using visitations and phone calls) based on gender. Ancillary outcomes of counseling time required based on language and ethnicity are also evaluated. Female smokers (N = 25) averaged mean total counseling times of 247.4 minutes (80-410) and male smokers (N = 9) averaged 217.8 (90-350), a difference that did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.4343). English speakers (N = 20) averaged total mean counseling times of 198.8 minutes while Spanish speakers (N = 14) averaged 297.9 minutes, a statistically significant result (p = 0.0017). Our findings are inconclusive with respect to the influence of gender on counseling times for a Community Health Worker based smoking cessation project. The difference in counseling times between men and women, though not reaching statistical significance, could be of clinical importance but would require further study with a larger sample size. Although several limitations exist in this project, these results indicate it is necessary to design counseling strategies to better treat certain target populations based on gender, language, and ethnicity more effectively and more research is needed to determine the most appropriate method.'

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