Helping Smokers Quit
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics has confirmed the “pivotal role” that community pharmacies can play in implementing smoking cessation services.
The study was conducted jointly by researchers at the University of Sydney and the Naresuan University in Thailand and involved a meta-analysis of over 1,000 articles and an in-depth analysis of five major smoking cessation studies from around the world.
The researchers concluded that “pharmacist-led interventions can significantly impact abstinence rates in smokers”.
Importantly the study recommended that “health policy-makers should direct incentives for community pharmacists to provide such services.”
The researchers reiterated the fact that there is “now substantial evidence that smoking cessation interventions, provided by health-care professionals can result in clinically significant abstinence rates.”
They pointed to four critical attributes of community pharmacists that make them ideal in providing smoking cessation interventions:
- Their accessibility;
- They retail smoking cessation products;
- They are highly trained in providing counselling and advice about various medications; and
- Their skills in providing behavioural support to patients.
The study also referred to previous economic studies indicating that “smoking cessation services delivered by community pharmacists are cost-effective”.
Overall, the study found that pharmacist-led interventions were more than twice as likely to result in better abstinence rates and that, with the use of nicotine replacement therapies alongside pharmacist counselling, were up to more than three times as likely to result in better abstinence rates.
The latest research utilises studies emanating from developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden, indicating the likelihood of similar results being achieved should such services be made available in Australia.
Governments in a number of countries including New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada currently fund pharmacist-led smoking cessation services.
However, in Australia there is little or no funding to support community pharmacies to provide counselling and advice to assist smokers to quit.
Nicotine addiction is responsible for 8 per cent of the total health burden in Australia and is the nation’s most expensive lifestyle related health conditions costing many billions of dollars every year.
It is indisputable that the cost of investing in community pharmacy to provide these smoking cessation services would be offset many times over by reduced costs across the wider health system from increases in smoking abstinence rates.
Any investment in pharmacy based counselling would work in tandem with established support mechanisms including the national Quitline
Reproduced from Forefront 30/4/14
