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Tobacco addiction causes 438,000 deaths in the United
States each year, making it the leading preventable cause of death.
In addition, some 8.6 million Americans live with serious smoking-related
illness. Of the 44.5 million current smokers, 70 percent say that
they would like to quit. But without assistance, less than five
percent are able to stop smoking. They need help from health professionals,
whose advice serves as a powerful motivator.
The Smoking Cessation Leadership Center (SCLC) is a national program
office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that aims to increase
smoking cessation rates and increase the number of health professionals
who help smokers quit. The Center creates partnerships for results
with a variety of groups and institutions to develop and implement
action plans around smoking cessation. Partnerships with dental
hygienists, nurses, pharmacists, emergency physicians, hospitals,
labor unions, family physicians, the Veterans Health Administration
and myriad other groups all lead toward the same goal: saving lives
by increasing cessation rates and cessation interventions.
Dr. Schroeder and the Smoking Cessation
Leadership Center was featured in the January, 2007 issue of
O Magazine! The
article was a follow-up to his November, 2006 issue. Please
download for a copy of the January article. Both articles are
available available online.
Steven Schroeder, director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership
Center, authored an article entitled “What
to Do With a Patient Who Smokes,” published in a recent issue of
JAMA—the Journal of the American Medical Association—on
July 27, 2005 (v.294 n.4).
Kentucky has the highest smoking rate in the nation.
But it also has a governor concerned about this problem. Gov. Ernie
Fletcher, who is a graduate of the University Of Kentucky College
Of Medicine, called a press conference in early July to announce
the state’s use of the quitline 1-800-Quit-Now. The telephone
service will provide brief intervention and support for people who
want to stop smoking or using other tobacco products. During the
press conference, members of the media and attendees were given
small, plastic quitline cards as promotional tools, created by the
Smoking Cessation Leadership Center. Kentucky's smoking prevalence has dropped to 27% over the past three years.
Connie Revell, the deputy director of the Smoking
Cessation Leadership Center, was named the co-chair of a promotion
task force for the North American Quitline Consortium, in July 2005.
The task force is charged with two aims—working on communications
between quitlines and national funders regarding promotional activities
and developing a report on the promotions of quitlines and their
influence.
For more information on the North American Quitline
Consortium, visit http://www.naquitline.org/
A article in the American Medical News (July
25, 2005) looks into ways that the guidelines for how physicians
help patients quit smoking can be improved. In the article, Smoking
Cessation Leadership Director Steven Schroeder is quoted as noting
that while the five A’s are an honorable set of principles,
there are other ways, including use of the quitline, for those physicians
who cannot follow these full guidelines.
Connie C. Revell, Deputy Director of the Smoking
Cessation Leadership Center, and Steven A. Schroeder, Director,
authored the concluding commentary in the April 2005 issue of Nicotine
& Tobacco Research—the journal of the Society for Research
on Nicotine and Tobacco. The article is entitled “Simplicity
matters: using system-level changes to encourage clinician intervention
in helping tobacco users quit.”
For more information, visit http://www.ntrjournal.org
The California Dental Hygienists Association, a partner
of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center (SCLC) has been awarded
the 2005 Wrigley/ADHA Tobacco Intervention Award given at the American
Dental Hygienists Association Annual Session this month in Las Vegas,
Nevada, in recognition of its Gold Rush campaign. This campaign,
created by the SCLC and the California Dental Hygienists Association,
asks every registered dental hygienist in California to hand out
at least one “Take Charge” gold card, a marketing device
with the helpline’s phone number, within one year. Participants
are asked to log in to a website to keep track of their referrals
to the helpline.
Providence Health Plan received the America’s
Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Community Leadership Award for its
work with “Make It Your Business: Insure a Tobacco-Free Workforce.”
AHIP, a national trade association representing nearly 1,300 health
plans that cover 200 million people, announced the award at its
Annual Meeting in June.
The Make it Your Business plan stems from work with the Tobacco-Free
Coalition of Oregon (TOFCO), a grant recipient of the Smoking Cessation
Leadership Center. Working with the Providence Health plan and other
leaders in business, labor, insurance and health policy on the “Make
It Your Business” plan, TOFCO urges businesses and insurers
to voluntarily cover and promote help for smokers who want to quit.
An 11-year-old coalition that works to stem the health and economic
toll of tobacco, TOFCO distributes an Employer’s Toolkit,
talks with business and health plan decision-makers, offers continuing
education courses, and publishes opinion pieces about the value
of effective stop-smoking programs. After the initial success of
Make It Your Business in Oregon, TOFCO is exploring the promise
of a national campaign that runs parallel and a couple of years
behind Oregon’s.
Providence and some other Oregon health insurers had worked for
eight years with TOFCO’s Health Systems Task Force to broaden
stop-smoking treatment before this latest effort to engage health
care purchasers and health insurance agents through the Make It
Your Business campaign. The campaign started as a pilot project
in July 2002 with a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant.
For more information on Tobacco-Free Coalition of
Oregon and on the Make it Your Business plan, visit http://www.tobaccofreeoregon.org/index.html.
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