Summary report of the workshop on data for monitoring tobacco use

Health Canada convened a workshop in Ottawa in March 1994 in order to consider existing measures of tobacco use in Canada and to develop consensus on a standard set of measures for monitoring tobacco use in the future. The impetus for the workshop was the growing awareness of inconsistencies in definition and approach that have arisen over many years of monitoring, and a concern that future efforts to control tobacco use could be hampered by inadequate data. This report proposes standard definitions of key terms, identifies core topics, briefly discusses major data quality issues and offers a set of survey questions to monitor the elements of tobacco use.