Nursing students’ academic training and their perception of smoking

Abstract

Smoking is a severe health problem that affects the global population the most effective and economically viable measure to minimize the negative impact of smoking on people’s health is health promotion and prevention. Health professionals are the agents who put these measures into practice. Academic nursing training deals with health education as a care strategy. In view of this situation, we carried out a study to get to know nursing students’ perception of smoking, in order to obtain information that can help us to plan the best way of addressing these contents in different undergraduate nursing subjects. It is a study carried out at a federal higher education institution between 2005 and 2006 among nursing course students. A questionnaire was used for data collection, followed by content analysis of the obtained answers. Results show a perception loaded with value judgments and earlier personal experiences about the theme. Thus, when planning to insert these contents into nursing course subjects, the question need to be taken into account.