Child Health and Disability Prevention
AB 75 had mandated that the Department of Health Services (DHS) issue protocols for an anti-tobacco component in CHDP, including protocols dissuading children from beginning to smoke, encouraging cessation, and providing information on the health effects of tobacco use on the user and nonsmokers, including children. DHS used a report produced by the National Cancer Institute, How to Help Your Patients Stop Smoking: A National Cancer Institute Manual for Physicians, and a supplement, Clinical Interventions to Prevent Tobacco Use by Children and Adolescents, as a model for developing and implementing tobacco prevention programs within CHDP.[3-6]
According to DHS, the department informed local agencies of the anti-tobacco requirement, developed a protocol, added three questions on tobacco to the CHDP claim form, and provided training in the use of the protocol.[7] While training targeted CHDP staff, the screens were actually performed by 4,500 provider organizations, not local CHDP staff.[8] The “train the trainer” model used by DHS assumed that the county-level staff, once trained, would indeed train the actual providers and require that the tobacco use prevention be done. This model assumed a commitment
Gordon Cumming, the DHS official responsible for CHDP, made his view of the CHDP funds clear when he met with the Tobacco Education Oversight Committee (TEOC) on December 3, 1991. When asked about a formal evaluation, Cumming told TEOC that “tobacco funds were meant primarily to provide for screenings of more children, and that the only evaluation is that entailed in the program management.”[9] He also admitted that he had little faith in the data collected on the answers to the three tobacco questions “because of the context of its collection and the difficulty with just getting correct birth dates on the invoices.”[9]
Another indication of the level of CHDP's commitment to tobacco use prevention is the nature of its program. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) guidelines are much stronger than those of CHDP, even though the CHDP program was supposedly based on the NCI guidelines. Under the CHDP protocol, the only requirement was an answer to three questions on the reimbursement form:
- Is the patient exposed to secondhand smoke?
- Does the patient use tobacco?
- If the patient does use tobacco, was the patient counseled about/referred for tobacco use prevention or cessation programs?[10]
The NCI guidelines recommend a much more involved role for the physician and the office staff. In 1994, when asked to critique the CHDP protocol, Marc Manley, chief of the NCI Public Health Applications Research Branch and a coauthor of the NCI guidelines, saw wide variances between those guidelines and the CHDP protocol.[11] For example, while the CHDP protocol makes the creation of a smoke-free office a “suggested” intervention, the NCI guidelines state unequivocally, “Create a smoke-free office” and require a list of six steps for accomplishing this.[4][12][13] Furthermore, the NCI provides detailed guidance on how to deal with smoking by people of different ages. The CHDP protocol simply says, “Reinforce the positive behaviors [and] dissuade patients and parents from beginning to use tobacco.”[10]
During the debate over AB 816, Lester Breslow, a former head of DHS and a member of the TEOC, was more direct when he described CHDP: “`Issuing a protocol' on tobacco education, but doing nothing to follow-up on its use; bringing administrators and physician aides into brief `training sessions”; and requiring checking three `tobacco points'