Bowe, Andrea and Marron, Louise and Devlin, John and Kavanagh, Paul (2021) An evaluation of the impact of a multicomponent stop smoking intervention in an Irish prison. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18, (22), 11981. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182211981.
External website: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/22/11981
The disproportionately high prevalence of tobacco use among prisoners remains an important public health issue. While Ireland has well-established legislative bans on smoking in public places, these do not apply in prisons. This study evaluates a multi-component tobacco control intervention in a medium security prison for adult males in Ireland. A stop-smoking intervention, targeting staff and prisoners, was designed, implemented, and evaluated with a before-and-after study. Analysis was conducted using McNemar's test for paired binary data, Wilcoxon signed rank test for ordinal data, and paired T-tests for continuous normal data. Pre-intervention, 44.3% ( = 58) of the study population were current smokers, consisting of 60.7% of prisoners ( = 51) and 15.9% of staff ( = 7). Post-intervention, 45.1% of prisoners ( = 23/51) and 100% of staff ( = 7/7) who identified as current smokers pre-intervention reported abstinence from smoking. Among non-smokers, the proportion reporting being exposed to someone else's cigarette smoke while being a resident or working in the unit decreased from 69.4% ( = 50/72) pre-intervention to 27.8% ( = 20/72) post-intervention ( < 0.001). This multicomponent intervention resulted in high abstinence rates, had high acceptability among both staff and prisoners, and was associated with wider health benefits across the prison setting.
B Substances > Tobacco (cigarette smoking)
HJ Treatment or recovery method > Substance disorder treatment method > Cessation of tobacco use
J Health care, prevention, harm reduction and treatment > Health care programme, service or facility > Prison-based health service
MM-MO Crime and law > Justice system > Correctional system and facility > Prison
T Demographic characteristics > Person in prison (prisoner)
VA Geographic area > Europe > Ireland
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