Trying to quit smoking? You are not alone, the State of Ohio is staging a major campaign against tobacco use. Case Western Reserve University has also been agressively promoting a smoke free environment and a smoking cessation program for employees. The following story is taken from Case's website, highlights were on the homepage today.

Case's Center for Health Promotion Research to establish the Ohio Tobacco Research and Evaluation Center

The Center for Health Promotion Research, a research and evaluation center in the School of Medicine's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, recently was awarded a $450,000 contract from the Ohio Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Foundation (TUPCF) to develop the Ohio Tobacco Research and Evaluation Center (OTREC). OTREC will assist with statewide tobacco prevention and control efforts supported by TUPCF.

Created by the Ohio General Assembly in 2000, TUPCF was funded with monies secured from the national Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between tobacco companies and 46 states. TUPCF is charged with reducing tobacco use among Ohioans, with an emphasis on youth, minority and regional populations, pregnant women and others who may be disproportionately affected by the use of tobacco. TUPCF programs include the distribution of community grants; Ohio's tobacco use counter-marketing campaign (STAND), and the free Ohio Tobacco Quit Line (1-800-QUIT-NOW).

The Case Western Reserve University-based research and evaluation center will work with more than 60 community organizations across the state that annually have received more than $12 million dollars in TUPCF funding to provide prevention and cessation programming and to encourage tobacco policy change throughout their communities. The center's work will involve the development of a statewide evaluation plan with a centralized data collection system and developing resources and tools for building local capacity in program evaluation. In addition, the center will be responsible for analyzing trends in regional and statewide youth and adult tobacco surveillance data, as well as changes in local clean indoor air policies.

Elaine Borawski, Ph.D., director of the Center for Health Promotion Research and principal investigator of the newly developed OTREC, stated, "We are very excited about this opportunity to work with TUPCF on this important public health issue to reduce tobacco use throughout Ohio. Part of our center's mission is to provide technical assistance to the public health community, drawing upon our research and evaluation expertise and the state-of-the-art technology that Case can provide to collect and disseminate data in ways that are innovative, efficient and useful to the local agencies. We are thrilled to take what we've learned at the local level and extend it to the statewide effort."

According to Jeff Willett, Ph.D., director of Evaluation for TUPCF, "Case was selected because it brought to the table the expertise, experience and technical resources needed to not only help us to evaluate our statewide efforts, but to develop a nationally recognized evaluation center that would serve as a resource to statewide tobacco prevention and control efforts across the country."

To learn more about the Ohio Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Foundation, visit their website at http://www.standohio.org. To learn more about The Center for Health Promotion Research, visit their website at http://www.case.edu/affil/healthpromotion/.