Smoking Prevalence and Smoking Prevention and Cessation in Saudi Youth - Research Paper Example

Continued smoking among the youth leads to addiction; a reality that brings a sense of urgency to the need for public health practitioners to intervene and curb further prevalence.

The challenge facing health practitioners in coming up with appropriate and timely intervention approaches has largely been a result of skewed reporting on the extent of smoking prevalence in schools. Since schools carry out questionnaires and administer reports to students in a bid to understand the extent to which youths engage in drugs and substance abuse, most of these reports have been biased and skewed to suit what the schools would wish to report. Therefore, the full extent of tobacco prevalence has been largely underestimated at the institutional levels in Saudi Arabia.

This has resulted in complacency among the learning institutions to come up with critical intervention strategies to counter the effects of tobacco use among the schools through designing appropriate cessation and prevention measures. In part, the unreliability of such reports and reluctance by educators and health practitioners to take action at the school level can be attributable to the inconsistency in the understanding of the terminologies. As such, a tacit operational definition of what constitutes smoking prevalence would provide educators and clinical professionals with practical and applicable methods to put in place smoking cessation and prevention strategies.

This paper, therefore, provides a report with principle-based research on smoking prevalence and how it relates to cessation and prevention strategies within the context of the youths in Saudi Arabia. The role of health care professionals in alleviating the adverse effects brought about by tobacco smoking stretches to not only enlightening the youths on the dangers of smoking but also coming up with appropriate measures to see to it that prevention and cessation strategies are incorporated. Despite the general decrease in cigarette smoking in Saudi Arabia, statistics have shown that the prevalence of smoking among the youth has been consistent (Jradi 2014).

Moreover, since initiation into smoking is made mainly during the adolescent and youthful years, understanding the factors that trigger prevalence and the corrective preventative and cessation measures could provide insights into the best approaches to deal with the challenge of smoking among the youths. One of the areas where interventions in tobacco smoking have been lacking in Saudi Arabia has been at the institutional level. In the United States and Canada, a large majority of health practitioners have been able to penetrate learning institutions and intervene in tobacco smoking cessation and prevention campaigns (Lewis et al. 2011, p. 249).

However, the same cannot be said of Saudi Arabia where the prevalence of smoking has been recorded to be higher among the youth than adults. Moreover, the smoking prevalence rates in Saudi Arabia follow similar patterns as those of the neighboring Arab states. For instance, while Kuwait has a male prevalence rate of 35 percent, Saudi Arabia records a prevalence rate of 34 percent (Subaie et al. 2011). The fact that Kuwait records a similar rate as that of Saudi Arabia, yet there is a wide divide in the prevalence rates between the adults and the youths points out on the need to have tacit intervention strategies in Saudi Arabia targeting the youths.