A web-based smoking cessation and prevention curriculum for medical students: why, how, what, and what next

This paper summarises some major developments in medical education relating to the health risks of tobacco and to training in tobacco cessation and prevention strategies, and discusses some of the barriers to training. We also describe a project whose purpose was to design, implement and evaluate a web-based self-study tobacco curriculum for medical students to teach medical students to assist smokers to quit and to counsel non-smoking adolescents not to start smoking. This curriculum addresses some of the barriers, namely lack of curriculum time, lack of access to materials and experts, and relevance of the materials. The project was designed and evaluated at two medical schools in Georgia: Morehouse School of Medicine and Mercer University School of Medicine. A curriculum on tobacco control strategies and techniques designed for use in clinical settings was made available to first-year medical students as interactive computer-based tutorials. The curriculum, based on the US Public Health Service Clinical Guideline for Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence, was divided into two parts: the tutorial and practicum sections. Pre- and post-exposure measures were collected for the evaluation. The mean differences for correctly answered knowledge items in the two schools were similar: mean for Morehouse was +2.07 and for Mercer +1.67, indicating improvements in knowledge for both schools. There were statistically significant improvements in all categories of self-rated ability to perform six counselling skills, except for Mercer students for the 'Ask' skill category (p=0.069). The amount of exposure (measured only at Morehouse) was not related to overall change in scores but was associated with self-reported improvement in skill in assisting patients to quit smoking, confidence in counselling patients not interested in quitting, and confidence in counselling teens. The web-based curriculum successfully improved the students' self-rated counselling skills. Given the need and desire on the part of practitioners for training, the curriculum may be found useful by practising physicians and other health-care professionals who wish to improve their skills in smoking prevention and cessation.