Many health-care providers are quick to advise patients to quit smoking, but few follow up with programs, plans or prescriptions to help them break the habit, new research from UC Davis has found.
In the most comprehensive national study of its kind, Elisa K. Tong of the Division of General Medicine at UC Davis, reported that health professionals in the United States do not fully follow national guidelines for working with patients who use tobacco products.
Survey participants cited numerous barriers to compliance with the guidelines, including their own tobacco use, perceptions of patient attitudes about quitting, a lack of training in smoking-cessation interventions and a sense that it was not part of their professional responsibilities.
The study appeared online this month in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, and will be published in the July issue of the journal.
“This paper presents two important findings,” said Steven A. Schroeder of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the UC San Francisco, who contributed to the study. “First, although clinicians could play an important role in helping smokers quit, far too often they do not do so. Second, clinicians themselves have very low smoking rates. Even nurses, who were previously assumed to be heavy smokers, are substantially below the national average. If the entire country smoked at the rate of health professionals, the United States would be one of the healthiest nations in the world.”
Great study! I am an ex-smoker and my doctor helped me a lot. I think that the clinicians could play an important role in helping smokers quit smoking, but sometimes they do not realize that.