Development of an audio visual resource to help raise awareness of smoking, tobacco and paan use within minority ethnic communities and its impact on oral health

Authors:
Tracey Norris and Smita Grant

Presenters:
Tracey Norris
Strategy Development Manager (Inequalities), ASH Scotland, Edinburgh, UK

Smita Grant
Project Manager, Minority Ethnic Health Inclusion Project (MEHIP), Edinburgh, UK

Abstract
To address smoking within minority ethnic communities, stop-smoking services must offer support, information and advice that is both accessible and sensitive to different cultures, religions and languages. As well as smoked tobacco products a wide range of chewed tobacco and tobacco-related products such as paan are also used within some minority ethnic communities. This creates new challenges for stop-smoking services about how best to support and raise the issue of smoking and chewing tobacco.

Knowledge and understanding of chewed tobacco products used amongst this community and its health impact varies amongst practitioners. To address this gap and the ongoing challenge of increasing engagement of communities with stop-smoking services a multi media resource was developed by the Minority Ethnic Health Inclusion Project (MEHIP) called ‘Oral health and trans-cultural tobacco: a guide for health professionals and trans-cultural tobacco users’. Launched in Edinburgh, 2009, the resource partly funded by ASH Scotland’s Tobacco and Inequalities Small Grants fund, is aimed at health professionals including dentists and stop-smoking staff.

Produced in English, Urdu, Bengali-Sylheti, Arabic and Punjabi the resource explores: the products, cultural contexts, the health impacts of consumption; provides a product photo gallery; glossary; and a series of printable reference resources.

Source of funding: ASH Scotland’s Tobacco and Inequalities Project Small Grants Fund (Funded by the Scottish Government and NHS Health Scotland), Big Lottery

Declaration of interest: none