Agurtzane Mujika PHOTO: Manuel Castells

A smoking cessation intervention in nurses from Navarra, designed by Agurtzane Mujika, a researcher at School de Enfermería, has achieved that 40% of these professionals quit smoking, compared to 6.7% who have managed to do so without the program. The study is the result of a doctoral thesis that was defended at King's College London, University of London.

Spain is among the countries with the highest smoking rates in the EU. Moreover, the proportion of smokers in nursing professionals, the largest healthcare group, in many programs of study exceeds that of smokers in the general population. This fact, coupled with the fact that as health professionals they have the knowledge, even in many cases first-hand experience of the effects of smoking, is a paradox.

Despite the relevance of this phenomenon, research directed at it is very limited. That is what led Dr. Mujika to design a smoking cessation intervention, especially oriented to the needs detected in nurses, and which has been granted twice by the Government of Navarra. "My scientific efforts, given the relevance of the phenomenon, had to be directed at identifying actions that would help the nurses themselves to give up this habit," says the doctor.

As for the nurses' level of satisfaction with the program, the expert emphasizes that it was high, since the approach to smoking was different: it was not just a prescriptive method in which they had to follow the therapist's instructions, but the nurses themselves were the protagonists of the sessions and, through dialogue and reflection on their habit in a climate of trust and without being judged, that is how they managed to quit smoking.

Personalized treatment
The study began with an exploratory phase, through questionnaires and personal interviews with the nurses, where it was detected that, among the factors influencing their smoking habit, were addiction, socialization, professional stress and routine. Likewise, nurses who currently smoke and those who smoked in the past differed in their opinions regarding this phenomenon.

The results of this exploration served as the basis for the design intervention, which was carried out with professionals of the Clínica Universidad de NavarraThe intervention consisted of four individual sessions of a maximum of one hour in which they talked about their habit, their daily life and how they lived with it.

For the author of the study,"if these results were replicated at programs of study on alarger scale, they could be extended to other health professionals and healthcare settings, which would result in an improvement in their health in the first place, and potentially in that of their patients".