Nurse-delivered Smoking Cessation Intervention
This journal article describes a study that used a quasi-experimental design to determine the effect of a nurse-delivered smoking cessation intervention for hospitalized smokers on smoking cessation rates and smoking cessation self-efficacy at six months after enrollment. The study was conducted at a 450-bed major teaching and research tertiary care hospital serving patients from across the province of British Columbia, Canada. The recruitment sites for the study were the two cardiac units. A total of 102 patients with cardiac disease who were self-reported smokers, were in the contemplation stage of smoking cessation, were admitted to one of the two hospital cardiac units with a projected length of stay longer than three days, and were physiologically stable were recruited to the study. The smoking cessation intervention consisted of two structured, in-hospital contacts, followed by three months of telephone support. Of the patients enrolled, 86 completed six-month follow-up questionnaires. Results indicate that, when subjects who were lost to follow-up were coded as smokers, 46 percent of the intervention group, compared with 31 percent of the control group, were nonsmokers. When key variables were controlled, the study found that those subjects in the control group were three times more likely to relapse and begin smoking than those who received the intervention. There were no significant differences in follow-up smoking cessation self-efficacy scores in the treatment and control groups. The intervention did appear to have some effect on self-efficacy scores, specifically efficacy related to positive/social and habit/addictive situations. Habit/addictive situations were noted to be significantly higher in the intervention group. The article concludes that the findings suggest that a nurse-delivered smoking cessation intervention improved the smoking cessation rate in patients with cardiac disease
