Doaa M. Nasr-Eldein Ali^1,, Sahar M. Soliman², Rania M. Gad El-Bastwese³

Smoking is one of the major public health problems worldwide, particularly among young adults. It is a major contributor to the global burden of diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular, and pulmonary diseases, and the harmful effects of smoking on non-smokers. Smoking cessation reduces health risks and improves quality of life for any age. The World Health Organization revealed that implementing tobacco control measures is a public health priority. Web-based interventions are a promising approach to supporting the behavioural health change of young adults who spend a significant proportion of their time using the internet. The study aims to assess the effect of using web-based health education sessions on smoking cessation among university students. Method: A quasi-experimental study design was used throughout this study on the World Wide Web (WWW) for globalization. The researchers used convenience sampling techniques to select 120 university students’ smokers and purposive sampling techniques to select 15 professional experts to evaluate the web-based health education sessions. The researchers used four self-administered questionnaires for data collection as follows: socio-demographic and economic characteristics of students, knowledge, subjective smoking behaviour, and attitude of students regarding smoking. This study was conducted in four stages: preliminary assessment stage, development stage, implementation stage, and evaluation stage. Results: The study revealed that there was a significant improvement in the students’ knowledge about smoking after the completion of web-based sessions (P≤ 0.05), with a significant reduction in the number of cigarettes consumed per day, with a percent change of 52.01%. The prevalence of smoking abstinence rates has significantly increased from 6.7% after 1-month post-web-based sessions to 25% at 3-month follow-up. There was a significant increase in attitude scores. In addition, all experts reported that the design of the health education sessions was clear and attractive. The students described the sessions as useful and attractive sessions that were uploaded on an accessible and easy-to-navigate website. Conclusion: Web-based sessions have been demonstrated as an effective tool for smoking cessation interventions. The developed web-based sessions resulted in improvements in students’ knowledge, smoking behaviour, and attitude regarding smoking, so it is recommended to evaluate medium- and long-term smoking cessation follow-up at 6 months and 12 months

smoking, smoking cessation, young adults, university students, web-based education