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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Aaron W. Bohannon, MPH, CHES, Family & Community Services, Inc., 143 Gougler Ave., Kent, OH 44017 and R. Scott Olds, HSD, MLIS, Health Promotion, Kent State University, PO Box 5190, Kent, OH 44240, 330-672-0679, rolds@kent.edu.

The Portage County Tobacco Prevention Coalition (PCTPC) in northeast, Ohio, funded by the Ohio Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Foundation, established a relationship with a university public health professional in 2002 to establish a comprehensive surveillance and evaluation protocol for their tobacco control program. It was recognized early that evaluation and surveillance were critical aspects to developing an effective tobacco prevention and control program at the county level. To establish a reliable, valid and comprehensive surveillance and evaluation system for local tobacco control programming the collaborative worked together to assure an assessment protocol using standard measures recommended by the Office on Smoking and Health from the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). Adopting the CDC guidelines, the PCTPC allocated resources to support the creation of the local surveillance and evaluation system. Each year, the system collects anonymous data from participating school district children in grades six, eight, ten and twelve on measures from the Youth Tobacco Survey. A total sample of 2,043 voluntarily completed the anonymous YTS. Youth tobacco use declined in 2005 in real percentage points from 23.4% to 19.1% across all grades in the five districts participating in the PCTPC's youth prevention programming. A local evaluation and surveillance system is a necessary part of providing the PCTPC with essential data to monitor tobacco use among youth in participating districts and doing so has generated increased community support for tobacco prevention efforts and will serve us well in continued funding requests.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the steps taken to establish a comprehensive surveillance system.
• Identify how the surveillance system has served multiple purposes including evaluation, program justification and continued funding.

Related Web page: www.pctpc.org

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered