University Smoking Cessation During Pregnancy Intervention Project

This project focuses on designing an intervention to promote smoking cessation among pregnant women, recognizing the significant health risks associated with maternal smoking, including low birth weight, preterm deliveries, and infant mortality. The intervention design emphasizes individual behavioral counseling, grounded in behavioral theory, to reinforce smoking cessation. The project details the target behavior, methods, and ethical considerations, highlighting the importance of confidentiality and autonomy. The evaluation strategy involves monitoring the reduction in cigarette consumption through self-reporting, with complete cessation being the ultimate success metric. The project acknowledges potential limitations, such as the reliance on self-reported data. The project also explores the comparison between pharmacological and behavioral interventions, emphasizing the need for methodological rigor in behavior change interventions. The assignment aligns with the goals of Health Psychology and Public Health to maintain health and prevent illness.

Smoking Cessation
During Pregnancy
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

Background & Aims
 Cigarette smoke contains several thousands of chemical includes some very hazardous
compounds such as Nicotine, Cyanide, Lead, Carbon monoxide and other carcinogens
(Quinn et al., 2017).
 When smoked during pregnancy, several complications in the infant can be observed,
which includes:
1. 20-30 % of incidence of low-birth weight
2. 14% of preterm deliveries
3. 10% of infant deaths

Continued…
 Maternal smoking has shown increased risk of asthma in the infants.
 The aim of this intervention project is to induce smoking cessation habits in the mothers,
which will subsequently reduce the risk of relevant complications in the infant.
 Smoking during pregnancy has been reported to increase the risk of SIDS- Sudden Infant
Death SYndrome

Intervention Design
 Pharmacotherapies along with support from health care systems and other technical
providers of health are promising strategies to help the pregnant women quit smoking.
 However, to increase the efficiency in achieving possible results, interventions that are
focussed on the lowest levels of the community, that is, targeting individuals rather than
cohorts, needs to be ensured.
 Individual behaviour counselling is one of the most promising and effective strategy to
ensure smoking cessation in pregnant women.

Behavioural Theory
 In behavioural counselling, the therapist will focus on one particular
individual at a time and reinforce desirable behaviour, that is smoking
cessation, in the pregnant women (Hayden, 2017).
 Such intervention is in compliance to the behavioural theory which
includes application of science to achieve resolution to specific
behavioural problems.

Target Behaviour
 The target behaviour that is aimed to be achieved with the help of specified intervention
is smoking cessation.
 The intervention specified, that is individual behaviour therapy follows the behavioural
theory and use it to induce behavioural changes in the subject.
 To achieve target behaviour, the subjects requires to be given extensive knowledge on
the harms smoking does on their health as well as the health of their babies.

Continued…
 Understanding Behaviourism or behavioural psychology requires in-depth insight on the
behaviours, which are acquired by the subject via conditioning.
 To ensure that interventions concerned with behaviour management are successfully
implemented, the therapist requires to attain knowledge on the conditioning and then
induce changes to the environment to ensure stimuli that shapes the subject’s actions.

Methods & Ethics
 The participants will include women in their first trimester of pregnancy, who have the
habit of smoking.
 The intervention design will require inclusion of behaviour therapists and aid from other
health care professionals.
 The professional will conduct one-to-one interview and sessions at regular intervals with
the concerned subjects.

Continued…
 Key ethical issues that may arise during the implementation of interventions will be
associated with confidentiality of patients and their right to autonomy.
 A pregnant woman may point smoking as their personal choice, which would require
extensive education on the harms of smoking given to the woman.
 Individual sessions are effective and offer least incidence of ethical issues.
 Individual sessions with the subjects allows them to have privacy regarding this sensitive
matter.

Evaluation
 The key measure for evaluation of the intervention design will include the count of smoke
breaks taken by the subject.
 Indication of success will be associated with the reduction in the count of cigarettes
smoked in day by the subject.
 No control group is required as only smoking cessation is measured and not its efficacy
on the health.
 The subjects will report their behavioural changes during the conduct of unstructured
interviews and therapy sessions.

Continued…
 Success will be determined by complete smoking cessation.
 Constant monitoring of the behaviour of the subject is required, which is time-consuming.
 Data will be collected from self-report by the subjects, which may limit the reliability of
the data, acting as potential limitation (Greene, 2017).

References
Greene, R. (2017). Human behavior theory and social work practice. Routledge.
Hayden, J. (2017). Introduction to health behavior theory. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Quinn, P. D., Rickert, M. E., Weibull, C. E., Johansson, A. L., Lichtenstein, P., Almqvist, C., ... &
D’Onofrio, B. M. (2017). Association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and severe
mental illness in offspring. JAMA psychiatry, 74(6), 589-596.