The benefits of quitting smoking are well established.
All types of health professionals can play an important role in offering smokers information about quitting, motivating smokers to quit, as well as assessing their dependence on nicotine and providing assistance to quit.
Brief interventions for smoking cessation involve opportunistic advice, encouragement and referral.
Support your clients by:
- asking about their smoking and assessing their interest in quitting.
- providing advice to stop smoking.
- offering support of nicotine replacement therapy or medications if appropriate (medical staff only).
- offering counselling and/or providing a referral to Quitline.
- referring to other services or health professionals.
- actively encourage and support their patients/clients in their quitting journey.
Research shows that encouragement and brief advice from health professionals is appreciated and will often lead to action. Advice based help and pharmacotherapy can both increase the rate of success of quit attempts, and when they are used the benefits are cumulative.
Tobacco smoking is responsible for the deaths of about 15 500 Australians each year and smoking related disease contributes as a comorbidity to many others.
Smoking remains a social justice issue with vulnerable groups, such as Indigenous Australians and people with a mental illness, bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of disease. There is also growing evidence that smoking reinforces and intensifies disadvantage.
Smoke-free services and settings encourage and support quitting and help prevent the uptake of smoking by de-normalising smoking. The addition of accessible information and resources to assist interested people to quit smoking can really make a supportive service environment.