Pediatric Residency Training On Tobacco

The American Academy of Pediatrics and other leading health agencies call upon pediatricians to address environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), prevent smoking onset in youths, and encourage cessation of tobacco use by adolescents and their parents. Systematic intervention on tobacco by pediatricians would protect infants and young children from the harmful effects of ETS and save adolescents from a lifetime of addiction and tobacco-related disease. Despite this, few pediatricians address tobacco use, and pediatric residency training programs are not preparing residents to play a leadership role in the anti-tobacco arena.

The Pediatric Residency Training on Tobacco project is a four-year randomized controlled study of the efficacy of a specialized tobacco intervention program for pediatric residents. Eight participating pediatric training sites were randomly assigned to a Special Training condition featuring "Solutions for Smoking", a hybrid CD-ROM/Website training program. Six sites were randomly assigned to a control condition that provided standard print literature. Key features of "Solutions for Smoking" include a website containing background material on tobacco, interviewing, behavioral and pharmacological aspects of intervention, and a series of CD-ROMs containing audio-visual vignettes that model state-of-the-art interviewing and tobacco intervention skills. Residents are expected to practice the interventions with patients in their Continuity Clinics, and all sites are provided with brochures and other intervention materials for this purpose. Study investigators meet with residents at all sites three times per year to discuss the program and the residents’ efforts to intervene on tobacco with their patients. Annually, second and third-year residents participate in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) and a Resident Tobacco Survey. Patients and parents attending each of the Continuity Clinics complete Patient and Parent Tobacco Surveys at baseline and end of study.

Primary endpoints include changes over time in pediatric residents’ tobacco intervention knowledge, skills, and activities as reported on the Tobacco Surveys and measured by performance on the OSCEs at baseline and follow-up. Secondary endpoints include changes in smoking, other tobacco use, and control of ETS by patients and parents. The study hypothesizes that pediatric residents in both arms of the study will be similar in knowledge and skills at baseline; that residents in the specialized training program will acquire more knowledge and greater skills for tobacco intervention during the course of the study compared to residents in the control condition; and residents in each condition will increase the frequency in which they address tobacco in patients and parents.