On October 6th, 2023, the American Psychiatric Nurses Association awarded Dr. Patricia Mulvaney-Roth, AGCNS’19/DNP’22, MSN, APRN, PMHCNS-BC, First Place for her poster presentation at The American Psychiatric Nurses Association 37th Annual Conference.
The poster presentation titled "Implementation of the CATCH My Breath EBP Vaping Prevention Program Providing Education to Adolescents" is a representation of Dr. Mulvaney-Roth’s Doctor of Nursing Practice Evidence Based Practice (EBP) Scholarly Project.
Prevention of adolescent vaping has always been an area of interest to Mulvaney-Roth, and when she began her doctoral studies at Molloy in 2019 (following the Surgeon General’s call to swiftly address what was being termed an e-cigarette epidemic), she decided she wanted to learn more about the program CATCH My Breath TM.
CATCH My Breath TM is a vaping prevention program that Mulvaney-Roth thought was particularly effective because it is didactic and offers classroom activities as well as small group discussions with a great attention to detail. In addition, it has two separate offerings: one for middle schoolers and one for high schoolers. After she made the decision to use this program and be trained in teaching it to others, SAMHSA, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, endorsed the CATCH My Breath TM vaping prevention program as the only EBP program for adolescents.
From there, Mulvaney-Roth carried out her scholarly project on vaping prevention for adolescents by interning at the Suffolk County Department of Health. Through this internship, she was able to conduct her scholarly project in a Suffolk County middle school. The purpose of this scholarly practice inquiry project was to provide an evidence-based educational program on vaping prevention for adolescents and evaluate the effect of that program on participants’ knowledge, perception, and vaping use. The students attended a 50-minute educational session once a week for four weeks. These classes were offered during health class in the library.
Six weeks after completion, the posttest results revealed that participants increased their knowledge with statistical significance noted. There were also positive changes in adolescents' e-cigarette use from the beginning of the program. According to Mulvaney-Roth, “Although not a statistically significant finding, this has clinical significance. Perceptions were favorable on pretest with little change on posttest. Ninety two percent of the students found the program educational.”
Mulvaney-Roth feels that it is important that adolescents are provided with an EBP vaping prevention education program so that they can understand the harms of using e-cigarettes. She concluded, “The CATCH My Breath EBP vaping prevention program is a great asset to any current middle or high school's health class vaping curriculum. It can be custom tailored to the school's needs. The recognition of an award for this work validates the importance of addressing adolescents' health needs by utilizing EBP educational programs in the school systems for vaping prevention.”