Get ready for National No Smoking Day – It’s your job!

It’s No Smoking Day 2019 on Wednesday March 13, the national health awareness day that encourages smokers to quit.

But do you know the range of options now available for you to help different smokers quit their way and that there is help for you to adapt to your local smoking cessation offer?

The new PCRS Guide to Diagnosing and Managing Tobacco Dependency identifies a number of characteristics of smokers who present to healthcare practitioners, clustered here into five different easily recognisable ‘smoker-types’.

The guide gives examples of the language that can be used to open conversations with patients about smoking, explores the treatment choices available and provides expert commentary on these fictional case studies and links to relevant resources.  The purpose is to illustrate both the importance of VBA (Very Brief Advice) done right and how the post-VBA process can be tailored.

The character scenarios are:

• Male 33 years old, attending for back pain
• Pregnant and children at home
• Serious mental illness with attendance at in-patient service
• 56-year-old manual worker– attended urology clinic with urinary symptoms and blood in urine
• 52-year-old woman, recently had a 24-hour admission with ‘chest pain’ diagnosed as acid reflux

The pragmatic guide is a practical, immediately implementable, evidence-based framework to enable healthcare professionals to routinely identify smokers, encourage a quit attempt and support that quit attempt within the real-world context of their own professional sphere.

Use it to refresh your knowledge and make sure you are ready to help your patients to start a quit attempt on No Smoking Day.

PCRS Executive Chair Dr Noel Baxter says: “There is no longer a one size fits all tobacco dependence treatment offer as local commissioners decide how best to spend their tighter financial envelopes based on their local priorities and opportunities. This guide is designed to allow you to do your job of treating tobacco dependency with the resource and time you have right now. I do urge you to read the character scenarios to realise that when the gold standard isn’t available to refer to – there is still something you can do that is proven to make a difference.”