by Susan Griffith

Case Western Reserve University's dental, medical and nursing schools-in one of the first collaborative efforts among the three-are teaming up with Cleveland municipal school students to help stamp out smoking.

photo by Susan Griffith Case dentistry, medicine and nursing students team up to help stamp out smoking.

This summer, students from Case's Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, School of Dentistry and School of Medicine-along with Jazzmyn Finney and Saralyn Weppelman, two Cleveland Municipal School students from Future Connections-designed the 2003 Summer Multidisciplinary Innovation Learning Experience, or SMILE, Smoking Cessation and Prevention Program.

SMILE takes a unique two-prong approach, educating both young adults and future health care workers on the medical and clinical health risks of smoking. The health education curriculum for sixth- and ninth-graders, which consists mostly of classroom presentations, was piloted at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland this summer. The interdisciplinary program for students being trained in the health professions, which involves seminars and speakers, may be tested at the dental, medical and nursing schools as early as this fall.

For more than a year, James Lalumandier, chair of community dentistry and director of the Healthy Smiles Sealant Program, and Susan Wentz, assistant professor of family medicine, project director of Office of Urban Area Health Education Center and Case NetWellness director, had searched for a way to bring students from the two professional schools together. They found it this spring, about the same time a study from the Case dental school revealed that dental practitioners asked their patients about smoking habits but few felt comfortable providing information to help their patients stop.

When Bette Idemoto, a nursing doctoral student who has been interested in smoking cessation for more than 15 years, heard about SMILE, she saw it as a way for the nursing school to incorporate anti-tobacco education into its curriculum and quickly joined the cause.

Return to the online edition of the 8-21-03 Campus News.

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