Developing and validating a new tool: physicians' barriers, attitudes and practices towards applying smoking cessation interventions in their clinics. [Abstract]

Objectives
Endocrinologists and other clinicians who provide care to diabetic patients have ideal teaching opportunities to connect and deliver tobacco cessation interventions in diabetes care. This study aimed to develop, validate and measure the reliability of a new tool that would be used to evaluate physicians’ attitudes and practices regarding tobacco cessation counselling in patients with diabetes, as well as barriers to deliver tobacco cessation counselling in their clinics.

Methods
This study was conducted from March till December 2012 in the endocrine clinic at Hospital Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. A standardised, 22-item, self-administered questionnaire was developed to determine (i) physicians’ attitudes and practices regarding tobacco cessation counselling in patients with diabetes, and (ii) barriers in delivering tobacco cessation counselling in their clinics. Face and content validity were assessed. Six pharmacists, whom were faculty members with experience and expertise in research and in the development of surveys, reviewed the questionnaire to assess its content validity.Reliability test was run along to check whether the new tool questions are correlated with one another adequatly or no.

Results
Reliability test for the tool was pretested on a sample of 25 physicians physicians who ran the endocrine clinic at Hospital Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. Reliability analyses for the attitude domain and practice domain were 0.710 and 0.720, respectively.

Conclusions
The questionnaire was valid and reliable to be use for the evaluation of physician’s barriers, attitude and practice regarding tobacco cessation counselling in the diabetics clinics.