Prevention and education

Reducing smoking among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is a critical element of closing the gap in health outcomes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people [43959].

An important way of reducing the harms from tobacco smoking among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is to provide education about the risks of smoking, and to reduce the proportion of people who take up smoking in the first place [29610].

There have been a number of education campaigns running recently in schools with high Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations. These campaigns focus on healthy lifestyles, which include information about smoking. One example of a successful education campaign is the Queensland

program, which is run through the Institute of Urban Indigenous Health (IUIH) [30104].

Health promotion activities and community education programs have been found to be most effective when they use a multi-level approach to support tobacco control [30424]. These may be culturally sensitive social media campaigns or promoting services that help individuals to quit. It is important that as well as providing education about tobacco harms, organisations providing health promotion activities are able to refer people who want to quit to smoking cessation support services. Fostering partnerships between organisations helps to ensure people are part of a network of care that links services to together.