Measures
A survey administered before and after the educational intervention, which included items based on a previously developed and validated questionnaire, “Helping Smokers Quit” (Sarna, Bialous, Ong, Wells, & Kotlerman, 2012a), was used to assess nursing interventions in smoking cessation. Native speakers translated the Czech Republic Helping Smokers Quit (CR-HSQ) survey. Reliability was reestablished by test-retest (93% of the K values were in the acceptable range, i.e., >.7). A nine-item subscale evaluated nurses’ frequency (“always, usually, sometimes, rarely, or never”) of self-reported delivery of smoking cessation interventions using the five A’s, plus items about recommending use of a telephone quitline for cessation, recommending tobacco cessation medications, reviewing barriers to quitting for patients unwilling to make a quit attempt, and recommending a smokefree home. A three-item subscale assessed attitudes about nurses’ smoking, involvement in helping patients stop smoking, and need for additional skills or training (rated on a 5-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree). A 13-item subscale evaluated attitudes and confidence in counseling patients to quit smoking (responses on a 5point scale ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree), and a six-item subscale evaluated level of counseling proficiency (responses on a 5-point scale ranged from poor to excellent) (Corelli et al., 2005). Additional items asked about nurses’ sex, age, and smoking status. Nurses were asked if they ever smoked 100 or more cigarettes in their lifetime, and if they smoked now and were classified as current, former, or never smokers. Professional characteristics included work setting and years since their basic nursing educational program. The survey administered before and after the educational program contained the same items.