Objectives: This study was aimed at assessing the current counselling practices for smoking and tobacco use cessation in urban and suburban dental practices. The study also investigated if there are any differences in the counselling practices of dentists on the basis of their qualifications. Methods: A cross sectional studywas designed based on a self-structured questionnaire with 16 items that was distributed to 200 dentists. Responses to the individual items were cross-tabulated with the dentists’ qualifications. Results: Responses from a total of 197 participants were assessed after rejecting 3 erroneously filled questionnaires. This study found that most dentists donot always advise their patients to quit smoking. Even though majority of them believe that patients should be encouraged to stop smoking and that appropriate training should be given to dentists in relation to smoking cessation, an overwhelmingly high number don’t see counselling for smoking cessation to be part of their job. The postgraduate dentists generally demonstrated more favourable smoking cessation counselling behaviour compared to graduate dentists. Conclusion: Based on the observation that more formal training corresponds to better attitude towards smoking cessation counselling, it can be said that there exists a need to incorporate training for the same in the core dental curriculum. Also, instead of the prevalent directive advice-oriented methods, a more patient-centred approach during counselling can help improve the outcome of smoking cessation efforts.
