Changing practitioner behavior and building capacity in tobacco cessation treatment: the TEACH project.

OBJECTIVE: To facilitate interprofessional knowledge transfer to practice by increasing treatment capacity of health care practitioners to deliver evidence-informed smoking cessation counseling.

METHODS: TEACH (Training Enhancement in Applied Cessation Counseling and Health) combines diffusion of innovations with principles of adult learning to address the lack of system capacity to implement evidence-based smoking cessation treatments. Participants were professionals from 15 disciplines with commitment from their supervisor to implement the intervention. Pre- and post-training course evaluation surveys assessed the extent to which learning objectives were achieved and guided a continuous quality improvement process.

RESULTS: Evaluation of 741 participants that attended the three-day Core Course from June 2007 to January 2009 revealed significant increases in pre- to post-training ratings of feasibility, importance, and confidence in using the intervention. In addition to attitudinal changes, practitioners made changes to practice behavior. At six months post-training, 55% of professionals were implementing the intervention and 91% engaged in knowledge transfer activities in their organizations/communities.

CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that TEACH impacted clinical practice and may serve as a model for knowledge translation initiatives in other health behavior domains.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: These data demonstrate that it is feasible to operationalize interprofessional knowledge translation models to transfer research findings into practice.