Smoke free hospitals: Rising to the challenge

doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7418.811-c

BMJ 2003;327:811-812 (4 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7418.811-c

Letter

Smoke free hospitals

Rising to the challenge

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—W McKee et al defend the provision of rooms forsmokers in response to the editorial by M McKee et al.^1
2 Theydraw attention to the fact that for smoking cessation to beeffective with inpatients, a follow up of more than four weeksis needed. They argue that this cannot be provided in acutehospitals.

The Royal London Hospital's inpatient service provides an intensivebehavioural intervention combined with nicotine replacementand outpatient follow up for at least four weeks. This is achievingfour week validated continuous abstinence rates of 54%. A growingnumber of acute hospitals within the United Kingdom are providinga similar cost effective treatment.³ The £390 000 spenton the smoking rooms could have funded such a service for avery long time.

Smoking rooms in hospitals also represent smoking cues and theirexistence may encourage smoking. Anecdotally, a number of patientswe treated . . . [Full text of this article]

Hayden McRobbie, research fellow

h.j.mcrobbie@qmul.ac.uk Barts and the London School of Medicine, London E1 2AD

Cressida Darwin, research health psychologist, Peter Hajek, professor of clinical psychology

Tobacco Dependence Research and Treatment Centre, Institute of Community Health Sciences, Barts and the London School of Medicine

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

Technorati What's this?

Relevant Articles

Smoke free hospitals: Challenges need to be faced: William McKee, Michael McBride, Deirdre O'Brien, Antony Stevens, and Christine Burns
BMJ 2003 327: 104. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]