Some hospitals participating in the study used stickers on patients’ charts to prompt nurses to ask about smoking status and give cessation advice. However, even with this reminder, nurses talked about smoking with their patients only 50 percent of the time.
Group discussions with nurses revealed that they often felt that they lacked enough information to advise patients or felt they might alienate patients by giving cessation advice, says Maribet C. McCarty, Ph.D., R.N., M.P.H., of the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.
The research results are reported in the November issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
“The nurses’ feeling that they were not adequately prepared to give smoking cessation advice is a concern …. In general, participants were not aware of the effectiveness of brief advice” for encouraging smokers to considering quitting smoking, she says.
"Advice from doctors and nurses carries a lot of weight with most people, and the impact of that advice increases when the professional is chosen by the individual and the advice is personal," says Jessie C. Gruman, Ph.D., executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Health, which studies health behavior.
Nurses were more likely to talk to patients about smoking if they were treating medical conditions that were either caused by or complicated by smoking, when the patient asked for help or when a discussion of smoking was prompted during a hospital admission interview, McCarty says.
This research was based on discussion groups with 75 nurses and followed up on the previous study that showed that nurses talked to patients about smoking cessation 50 percent of the time.
The research was funded with a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The American Journal of Health Promotion is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the field of health promotion. For information about the journal call (248) 682-0707 or visit the journal’s website at http://www.healthpromotionjournal.com.
Posted by the Center for the Advancement of Health http://www.cfah.org. For more research news and information, go to our special section devoted to health and behavior in the “Peer-Reviewed Journals” area of Eurekalert!, http://www.eurekalert.org/. For information about the Center, call Ira Allen, iallen@cfah.org (202) 387-2829.
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American Journal of Health Promotion