UIC LogoThat smoking is extremely injurious is no secret. Many youth smoking cessation programs have been organized for this purpose. Health care providers and educators nationwide who manage youth smoking cessation programs seemingly now have access to a free toolkit to enhance their programs.

The toolkit can be downloaded at HYSQ.org. It was crafted by the Helping Young Smokers Quit, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation steered by University of Illinois at Chicago scientists. The toolkit provides youth smoking cessation program leaders a method of assessing their programs’ efficiency in aiding high school aged-smokers to effectively quit.

Robin Mermelstein, co-director of the Helping Young Smokers Quit project and director of UIC’s Institute for Health Research and Policy, commented, “Youth smoking cessation programs are invaluable, but often the individuals and organizations who provide these programs do not have the time, money or experience to conduct an evaluation of their program to figure out if it helped young people quit smoking.”

The toolkit offers program administrators with questionnaires that could be given to volunteers in stop-smoking programs. Moreover, it comprises of tools to craft reports from pre-program, post-program and follow-up surveys and offer ideas for inferring outcomes.

Program leaders can now seemingly view how their programs compare with outcomes from a national sample of youth smoking cessation programs.

Susan Curry, program co-director and dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa, remarked, “Measurement is critical to the creation of successful tobacco cessation programs.”

Tracy Orleans, senior scientist at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a member of the foundation’s Public Health Team mentioned that this evaluation toolkit provides an imaginative and much needed vehicle to be able to learn from what works on an ongoing basis.

Every day an approximate 1,000 American teenagers, between 12-17 ages, seemingly turn into daily cigarette smokers, as per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Young smokers make an effort to quit more frequently than older smokers, but seemingly have fewer chances to discover and use effectual treatments.