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.