Effectiveness of Smoking Cessation Training in Improving the Capacity of Community Pharmacists to Provide Smoking Cessation Service in Davao City

Community pharmacists are ideal for providing and promoting smoking cessation intervention due to their accessibility, however, it's not commonly practiced and requires training.In efforts to build the capacity of community pharmacists on smoking cessation interventions, this study aims to evaluate the pre-training and post-training results of smoking cessation training given by the Department of Health to assess if there is an improvement in community pharmacists' knowledge regarding smoking cessation and tobacco addiction, their perceived role in smoking cessation intervention, their self-efficacy to provide smoking cessation counseling, and their intention to provide and practice counseling to smokers.This study adopted the quasi-experimental pretest-posttest research design with purposive, convenience, and snowball sampling to gather thirty (30) registered community pharmacists within Davao City.The mean score for knowledge increased from 78.1 on pretests to 81.2 on posttest (P-value: 0.395).The perceived role increased from 4.15 on the pretest to 4.52 on the posttest (P-value: 0.044).For self-efficacy, the mean score increased from 4.42 on the pretest to 4.73 on the posttest (P-value: 0.001).For the intention to provide and practice counseling, the mean score increased from 4.38 on the pretest to 4.88 on the posttest (P-value: 0.001).Additionally, the BTI checklist score, which evaluated the pharmacists' capacity to perform smoking cessation counseling through role-playing after the training, indicated a passing grade for all test variables, including not ready to quit, ready to quit, and relapse.Overall, the Smoking Cessation Training had significantly increased the community pharmacists' perceived role, self-efficacy, and intention to provide smoking cessation intervention to smokers, but had no significant increase in terms of knowledge.Hence, the pharmacists demonstrated readiness and competence in performing smoking cessation interventions after the training, as evidenced by the passing remarks in the BTI checklist evaluation.