Collaboration between occupational health professionals in smoking cessation treatment and support

Promoting health is an important part of occupational health (OH) professionals' daily practice. Occupational health services (OHS) support work ability and prevent both work-related diseases and lifestyle-related illnesses.

We focused on how interprofessional collaboration (IPC), regardless of whether the OHS provider is public, private or in-house, influences the implementation of smoking cessation treatment and support (SCTS). We studied IPC of OH professionals in SCTS and whether they differ depending on OHS providers.

We collected data through an online survey of a cross-sectional sample of OH professionals of physicians (n = 182), nurses (n = 296) and physiotherapists (n = 96) at two different time-points, in 2013 and 2017. The questionnaire contained questions on interprofessional SCTS practices, so that we could assess how the professionals' experiences differed from each other. We used explanatory factor analysis to study the collaboration, and the Kruskall-Wallis test to detect the differences between the OH professional groups as a post-hoc data analysis.

OH physicians (mean 3.4, SD 1.2) and OH nurses (mean 3.2, SD 1.1) experienced smooth collaboration in SCTS whereas OH physiotherapists (mean 2.5, SD 1.1) felt excluded from IPC. In-house OH centres (mean 3.5, SD 1.0) seemed to offer the best opportunities for implementing IPC in SCTS comparing to public (mean 3.1, SD 0.9) or private (mean 2.9, SD 0.9) OHS.

The IPC of OH professionals in SCTS interventions need to be rearranged. This requires boundary-crossing SCTS practices involving all professionals. All OH professionals should implement IPC in SCTS and share their specific competence.