the health effects of e-cigarette/vaping among students
Introduction
Our topic focuses on assessing the health effects of e-cigarette/vaping among students. Tobacco remains widely used and consumed in different ways, mainly through cigarette smoking and smokeless tobacco. However, four common traits characterize tobacco use regardless of the way people are using it. They include addiction associated with nicotine, which is behind most tobacco health hazards, individual variation in tobacco susceptibility, time-lag effects, and dose-response relationship. The United States Department of Health has issued an advisory on vaping issues. According to 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), statistics shows that use of e-cigarette or vaping among high and middle school students increased with an alarming rate, primarily between 2017 and 2018, with more than 3.6 million students using it in 2018 (Cullen et al., 2018). The health department recommends well-coordinated local, state, and national programs to prevent and reduce tobacco use by youths (Cullen et al., 2018).
Intervention Strategy
The intervention strategy is educating youths about the health dangers of tobacco use, including e-cigarettes. Community-based educational programs will help raise awareness of health concerns associated with vaping. The stakeholders have not adequately addressed educational programs that discourage vaping in adolescents and encourage behavior change. This strategy will include the entire community, including parents, local authorities, schools, and community leaders, such as religious leaders.
Rationale
Most of the past interventions have not involved parents’ participation, enhancing conversations between the parent community and school youth groups. According to Cullen et al. (2019), previous interventions and policies such as raising tobacco product prices, raising the minimum age of smoking, and restricting indoor smoking have not been efficient in fighting vaping among students. Therefore, since past efforts to enforce strong vaping policies are not effective, our program will provide students and school staff with ongoing education (Cullen et al., 2019). The program will also educate parents and provide them with relevant resources to learn more about vaping, prevention strategies, and their influence on children’s behavior change. It will encourage conversations among parent community groups and school youths and establish a robust relationship with local authorities.
Implementation of Education Program
The program will be implemented in three phases: Individual-level interventions, School-level interventions, and Community-level interventions. The individual-level interventions will target small units of individuals like a classroom, a specific school, or individuals with signs of vaping risks. The program will focus on implementing the characteristics of an individual that will significantly influence behavior change. These include attitudes, knowledge, behavior, self-efficacy, developmental history, values, age, goals, expectations, and stigma. They will raise awareness among individuals to reduce early adolescent smoking or nicotine vaping. The program will provide students with information to learn how to avoid tobacco, including deciding whether or not to abandon a specific party, what to do when another individual says that vaping is safe, and how to react when encouraged to try it. The individual-level interventions will enable students to learn various program’s content towards smoking cessation.
School-level interventions will focus on implementing these strategies in school settings, including high, middle, and elementary schools. They will be implemented in individual schools, specific classrooms, and the whole school district. The school-level interventions will reduce vaping nicotine use in individuals’ lifetime, increase nicotine vaping knowledge, improve students’ perceptions and attitudes of a vape-free lifestyle, and reduce tobacco use altogether. The program will include various materials to support schools in the implementation of vaping policy and regulatory programs. These include Guides for Teachers (Grade Level), Teacher Presentations (Annotated), Peer-facilitated Discussions, and Group Work, Appeal Posters (Age-Based). The program’s materials will reinforce a tobacco-free lifestyle, prevent regular and experimental vaping among students, increase students’ knowledge about the social, physical, and legal consequences associated with vaping, expose marketing strategies in the tobacco/vaping industry that attract students to vaping, develop counter-advertising messages, and demonstrate vaping refusal skills.
Finally, Community-level interventions will focus on the entire population within the state or country. These interventions will influence youth’s behavior, mainly by changing the social attitudes and norms, environmental factors, and economic conditions influencing vaping behaviors among students. Implementation will include media campaigns to change attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs. The media campaigns will message the costs or dangers that vaping or tobacco use has on students or youths. These messages will emphasize addictions that cause loss of control, depict the health hazards posed by chemicals found in e-cigarettes, and reinforce negative health effects of vaping or smoking from a youth-oriented perspective.
Outline
Introduction
Individual-Level Interventions
Electronic Cigarettes
Flavored Tobacco
Health Effects of Smoking
Tobacco and the Media
Tobacco Marketing
Addiction
School-Level Intervention
Grade level teachers’ guides
Annotated teacher presentations
Peer-facilitated discussions & group work
Posters to appeal to each age group
Community-Level Intervention
Resources to Educators:
Fact sheets
Lesson plans
Activity sheets
Media campaigns
Loss of control due to addiction
Dangerous chemicals in tobacco
Know the REAL Cost of Vaping
In conclusion, the program will also educate parents and provide them with relevant resources to learn more about vaping, prevention strategies, and their influence on children’s behavior change. It will encourage conversations among parent community groups and school youths and establish a robust relationship with local authorities. It will reinforce the current policies by schools and local governments in the regulation of vaping in school.