Prevalence of Smoking in Blacktown
Discuss about the Tobacco smoking in Black town.
According to the Cancer Council of Australia, smoking rates in the country exist at an average of 14%, however, the rates from group to group and location to location to location. Black town Australia is one of the areas with the highest smoking rates ranging from 17% although they are said to have dropped from 24.7% in 2013 (Black Town City Coucil, 2017). This includes the percentage of women who smoke at a rate of 13.5% (Black Town City Coucil, 2017). Morphet (2017) suggests that children as young as the age of fifteen years smoke in schools that have designated areas for smoking. Such students have done time at juvenile detention centers while some have been kicked out of their homes due to deviance behavior. This has made teachers to allow them smoke since stamping out nicotine makes it difficult for them to attend school.The trends of smoking in this town are higher due to the mixture of different population groups that exist in the suburb.
Smoking is a major issue that most states of Australia are dedicating resources to reduce it. Despite the smoke laws that have been put in place across Australia, the number of smokers has been increasing slowly (Creighton, 2017). In Black town, black markets have come up where people can access illegal tobacco for smoking since the legal ways of purchasing a cigarette have become expensive for the population. Since the black market smoking cannot be accounted for, this makes smoking one of the biggest challenges that the country is facing (Garrett, Dube, Babb, & McAfee, 2015). This makes the challenge of reducing smoke in Australia a problem. The control of smoking in areas like school play grounds or where people are has been effective but this does not mean that it reduces the overall smoking Black town.
The social determinants of health have been related to its prevalence and use in lower socioeconomic strata and vulnerable groups. The use of tobacco has been mostly related to lost opportunities and poverty. According to Mentis (2017) suggests that poor households spend 10% of disposable income on tobacco if there is one smoker in the family. On the other, gender influences tobacco intake since most men smoke more than women. Further, the level of education of individuals influences smoking and cessation patterns that people have. Educated individuals understand the risk of smoking and will thus not smoke or smoke less and healthy life. Indigenous people and poor people smoke more to deal with life stressors that they experience (NSW Government, 2018). These people are also exposed to early smoking and a culture of sharing that involves the use of tobacco. The socio-cultural patterns that indeginis and low-income people lead expose them to the social determinants that shape increased tobacco use. This calls for the need to put proper strategies in place to address the social determinants that influence the level of smoking within Black town.
Factors Contributing to Smoking in Blacktown
Since several tobacco laws passed have not been effective in prevention of smoking, then this remains the role of health practitioners in preventing tobacco use within the population. Golechha (2016) suggests that the need to involve primary care physicians in the tobacco control effort can be effective in achieving cessation from use. This is based on ensuring that practitioners give relevant quitting advice to smoking patients who visit facilities. Since tobacco cessation is part of the healthy people 2020 campaign, then the practitioner is charged with the responsibility of offering cessation advice to the patient during face to face meetings, it becomes easy for the practitioner to guide the patient on the steps that can be used in managing smoking (Schroder-Back, Peter Duncan, Sherlaw, Brall, & Czabanowska, 2014). The principle of health maximization requires the practitioner to work beyond the health requirements that the patient requests and put measures in place to maximize the needs of the patient. By advising the patient on the healthcare processes to follow in cessation of smoking, the practitioner maximizes the health benefits that the patient receives to ensure that they can meet the changing needs of the population.
To assist smokers quit, a community-based program will be used to guide the community and smokers in addressing issues related to smoking as a way of ensuring that they can reduce smoking rates and eventually quit. One strategy that has been effectively used to prevent use of drugs like tobacco is the reduction of the number of times and individual smokes during the day and increasing the ability to control the urge and at the same time develop new behavioral approaches that lead to reduced smoking and eventually quitting (Hanssens, et al., 2013). Discuss the process involved. The role of this community-based program is to alter tobacco use behavior by promoting tobacco use change within the community. Since community prevention strategies have existed in Australia for a long time, it means that the strategy will focus on developing strategies that can bring smokers together and at the same time involve the community to ensure that the mechanisms developed work well.
This process will entail strategies directed directly at the smokers and at the same time working with the community to address the issues that can help reduce smoking. Smokers need to be identified within the Black town area and brought together for an awareness campaign to understand personal and communal effects of smoking (Grandisson, Hebert, & Thibeault, 2015). These people will be put in groups that will be monitored to determine how the strategy works. The community on the other hand, will be used in policing to ensure that they participate in harnessing the adoption of new behaviors adopted by the smokers.
Primary Healthcare Aspect of the Issue
Planning
The planning process for tobacco cessation campaign starts with identifying the stakeholders to be involved in the campaign. First of all, there is need to develop a strategy for recruiting smokers into the plan. This entails gathering their information from hospital centers and at the same time use snow balling to get referral s from other smokers. The next step is to involve the public health sector which is mostly concerned with prevention mechanisms for such diseases (Asvat, Cao, Africk, Mathews, & King, 2014). The public health will authenticate the program and at the same time fine tune the guidelines on how the process needs to be done. Then, there is need to work with other common interest groups within the society like the cancer foundation, community groups and law enforcement agencies to ensure that proper mechanisms have been put in place to address the problem. Since the strategy is behavior based, it means that the mechanisms to be put in place will be developed by the practitioner with the assistance of the smokers themselves. Participatory approached have been regarded as the best in developing community-related strategies since they lead to community-owned mechanisms.
Implementation
The cessation plan will be implemented in stages to allow the smokers to change their behavior slowly. The first process will start with reduction of the number of sticks or packets smoked by the individual. Each smoker will set their own target and will be assisted by an appointed person who will be family of friend in monitoring the number smoked (Schroder-Back, Peter Duncan, Sherlaw, Brall, & Czabanowska, 2014). This is the first step in taking control of the smoking pattern. The next step will be to control the smoking urge through addressing the challenges faced during reduction of smoking. This strategy focusses on addressing the challenges that the individual faces and setting new targets for reducing smoking (Garrett, Dube, Babb, & McAfee, 2015). The family or friend role is to try and ensure that the individual’s smoking pattern is within the set targets and if they are beyond the limit, then challenges have to be noted down then addressed during the next meeting. Since this is a behavior change process, the practitioner plays the guiding role and leaves the family and friends to work on the whole process. These steps are repeated after every meeting duration that is set by the affected parties. However, the target for reducing the process needs to be set within a realistic period of six months where the individual needs to have quit smoking or changed to an occasional smoker. Rehabilitation is a process that takes time before the individual can successfully achieve the intended results.
Developing the Program
Evaluation
When evaluating the outcome, several indicators will be put in place to measure the effectiveness of the program in achieving the intended results. Rezac, et al. (2017) suggests that this strategy focusses on how the indicators of the whole process have been met. Since each of the steps had indicators that had been set for the individual to work on, the measures focus on how each of the set indicators in the process have been met and how effective the whole program has been achieved. This data needs to be synthesized to determine patterns of change and how the individual was responding to each of the mechanism that had been put in place. These findings from the evaluation are used to measure the effectiveness of the whole process, understand the positive aspects of the process and the challenges faced during the implementation process.
Conclusion
Tobaco is one of the publicly accepted drugs all over the world which makes it difficult to comntrol. The fact that smoking centers have been established in towns and institutions means that a behavioural change approach is the only way that can be used to mitigate the problem. By teaching smokers on how to reduce the number of puffs per day and assisting them to develop a reduction strategy that focusses on managing the urge and reducing the number of cigareetes smoked everyday, the community can be assisted to get away with the menace. People do not care the health challenges associated with smoking but will always continue smoking since it is publicly accepted in the society. Therefore, laws cannot work since despite the laws that have been established in Australia, there is no law that makes smoking illegal thus making it difficult to control. Through a participatory behaviour change approach that involves the community, smoking can be comtrolled within the society gradually until smokers can be able to control the urge of smoking and eventually quit
References
Asvat, Y., Cao, D., Africk, J., Mathews, J.D.A., & King, A. (2014). Feasibility and Effectiveness of a Community-Based Smoking Cessation Intervention in a Racially Diverse, Urban Smoker Cohort. American Journal of Public Health, 104(4).
Black Town City Coucil. (2017). Black Town City Coucil Social Profile. Black Town City Coucil.
Creighton, A. (2017, August). More smokers lighting up, despite ever-increasing taxes. The Australian.
Garrett, B., Dube, S., Babb, S., & McAfee, T. (2015). Addressing the Social Determinants of Health to Reduce Tobacco-Related Disparities. Nicotine & Tobaco Research, 17(8), 892-897.
Golechha, M. (2016). Health Promotion Methods for Smoking Prevention and Cessation: A Comprehensive Review of Effectiveness and the Way Forward. International Journal of Preventive Medicine, 7(7).
Grandisson, M., Hebert, M., & Thibeault, R. (2015). Practice guidelines for program evaluation in community-based rehabilitation. Disability and Rehabilitation, 39(12), 1243-1251.
Hanssens, S., Luyten, R., Watthy, C., Fontaine, C., Decoster, L., Baillon, C., . . . De-Grève, J. (2013). Evaluation of a comprehensive rehabilitation program for post-treatment patients with cancer. Oncology Nursing Forum, 38(6), 18-24.
Mentis, A.-F. A. (2017). Social determinants of tobacco use: towards an equity lens approach. Tobacco Prevention & Cessation, 3.
Morphet, J. (2017, July 22). Children as young as 15 allowed to smoke at recess and lunch at Warrakirri College in Sydney’s west. The Daily Telegraph.
NSW Government. (2018). Aboriginal communities and smoking. Retrieved from Health: https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/tobacco/Pages/aboriginal-communities-smoking.aspx
Rezac, P., Kureckova, V., Zamecnik, P., Shaw, D., Brazdil, M., Czekoova, K., . . . Salazar, M. (2017). Neurobehavioural Evaluation of Rehabilitation Programs for Dangerous Drivers. International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics AHFE 2017: Advances in Human Aspects of Transportation, (pp. 275-281).
Schroder-Back, P., Peter Duncan, Sherlaw, W., Brall, C., & Czabanowska, K. (2014). Teaching seven principles for public health ethics: towards a curriculum for a short course on ethics in public health programmes. BMC Medical Ethics, 15(73).
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