{"id":5062,"date":"2014-11-19T08:18:21","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T00:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/stopping-smoking-one-country-time\/"},"modified":"2024-08-30T11:09:40","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T03:09:40","slug":"stopping-smoking-one-country-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/stopping-smoking-one-country-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Stopping smoking, one country at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Oksana Burford\u00a0is not your ordinary university lecturer. Apart from working at Curtin, she\u2019s been an avid anti-smoking campaigner and has recently taken her research trial overseas to Paris, a city where smoking is socially acceptable. We talked to Oksana about her background, research and experience in Paris.<\/p>\n

Can you tell me about your background?<\/b><\/p>\n

I am Perth born and I was here on this campus as a fresh little 17-year-old in 1979. I got into the Western Australian Institute of Technology, as it was called then, and then dropped my studies because I wasn\u2019t in the right course. We didn\u2019t have things like mentoring programs and counseling, so in essence I was a dropout.<\/p>\n

Then I did a technical course at TAFE, but always thought I could do more and then got married and had children. I thought I wanted to come back, so I came back as a 37-year-old woman, 20 years later. So I\u2019ve gone from being a single parent, gaining a Bachelor\u2019s degree in Pharmacy to being an academic with a postdoctoral qualification and I\u2019m now doing international collaboration research.\u00a0So I\u2019m pretty happy about that, because it takes a lot of determination and hard work\u00a0and of course, support from the family. You can achieve your goals, especially in a great country like Australia, if you want it.<\/p>\n

\"Oksana\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Why did you get involved in the anti-smoking campaign?<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a parent myself and research has shown that smoking can lead to the next thing and it may go on and on. A strict pharmaceutical, lab-based research project didn\u2019t hit a chord with me, and being a parent, I wanted to do something different.\u00a0Therefore, my chosen PhD research entailed using a combination of photo ageing technology \u2013 APRIL\u00ae age progression software (to show young smokers what they\u2019d look like as an older smoker and non-smoker) complemented with professional health-care counselling.\u00a0 It\u2019s a blend of pharmacy and psychology.<\/p>\n

I conducted the research here in Australia under the primary supervision of Professor Moyez Jiwa who has been my mentor and colleague in this research area. Together with his expertise and guidance in delivering interventions in primary care, I conducted the research as a pharmacist in community pharmacies in Perth.\u00a0 I spoke to young smokers who said some marketing campaigns (health pamphlets, graphic health images on cigarette packets) didn\u2019t have much of an effect on them \u2013 they said that\u2019s not them. They\u2019re young, fit and healthy.\u00a0 With the photo aging and health care counselling project, I was now showing them their face \u2013 this is what mattered to them. \u00a0I had personalised the health promotion message and that\u2019s what hit them.<\/p>\n

\"Oksana_paris\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do you feel like you had an impact on some of the people you were working with in Paris?<\/b><\/p>\n

I feel very happy about conducting the small pilot trial \u201cFrench PAINT\u201d on the Paris university campus.\u00a0 My liaison in France was an academic, Professor Hector Falcoff from the Department of General Medicine, Paris Descartes University and he was instrumental in helping me set up the pilot trial on the university campus.\u00a0 Then I worked together with a GP (General Practitioner), Dr Souraya Kindarji.\u00a0 Together we conducted the research on the Paris campus \u2013 she was just as passionate about the smoking cessation message as I was and it proved to be an excellent collaboration.\u00a0 We aim to publish the paper next year.\u00a0 We delivered the photo aging intervention and complemented this with professional health care counselling.\u00a0 \u00a0At least 50 people that we spoke to and recruited for the trial went away with something. \u00a0We made a tiny bit of an impact on them and in years to come they might think again about it. Maybe we touched a few of their hearts \u2026 or their lungs maybe.<\/p>\n

I remember one young student on the Paris university campus who was coughing and coughing when he was walking through the area where I had my table set up for the trial. I spoke to him.\u00a0 It turned out he was only 18 years of age and had been smoking already for 4 years. I said to him: \u201cI\u2019m 50 and I\u2019m breathing and doing everything far better than you are at 18\u201d. He participated in the research.\u00a0 Hopefully, I will have made him think about it.<\/p>\n

What’s next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would like to return to Paris and once again work with Dr Kindarji and Professor Falcoff in setting up a randomised, controlled trial (a bigger sample size) with an economic analysis. \u00a0\u00a0We successfully conducted a small pilot trial and found recruitment was easy because there were a lot of smokers and they weren\u2019t shy to say it.\u00a0 \u00a0I am going to apply for some funding, an Early Career Research Grant.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I hope I am successful because I would like to continue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Curtin Professor Oksana Burford is not your ordinary university lecturer. Apart from working at Curtin, she\u2019s been an avid anti-smoking campaigner and has recently taken her research trial overseas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4275,"featured_media":5063,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":3,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-5062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-and-global-community"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"Curtin's anti-smoking campaigners","content":"

Oksana is not the only Curtin academic to passionately campaign against smoking in Australia.<\/p>\n

Professor Mike Daube, has been a leader in tobacco control and public health for four decades.<\/p>\n

A pioneer in the Australian anti-smoking campaign, Professor Daube is known for creating innovative mass media programs and successful campaigns for action including advertising bans, stronger health warnings and protection of non-smokers. He is currently the President of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, and chairs the Australian Government Expert Committee on Tobacco, which pushed for the plain packaging legislation that we have today.<\/p>\n","image":false},"related_courses":[{"title":"","qualification":"","link":"","description":"","faculty":""}],"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}},"post_components":false},"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Oksana_2-1000x500.jpg","author_meta":{"first_name":"Curtin","last_name":"University","display_name":"Curtin University"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-16 19:23:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5062"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=5062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}