Stopping smoking and saving lives
Smoking is the largest preventable cause of death in this country and more than one in ten adults put their health at risk by using tobacco.
So our hospitals now routinely check whether inpatients are smokers so they can be offered help to give up as a bonus to the medical treatment for which they came in.
The latest figures show that seven out of ten inpatients now have their smoking status documented on admission, a 15-fold rise in less than five years.
Of over 3,000 patients who confirmed that they smoked last year, about a third were supported by our in-house tobacco dependence service. Many were addicted to nicotine, but 380 of them remained smokefree a month after discharge.
In addition, hundreds of patients agreed to be referred to community stop-smoking services, and all pregnant women who were identified as a smoker received support from a specialist midwife or community advisor, with 274 quitting as a result.
The trust set itself targets to record smoking status and alcohol harm risk in its annual plans so that performance could be monitored every month. The proportion of patients recorded in both categories increased significantly last autumn, from 60% to 70% for smoking status and from 12% to 35% for alcohol.
The key to sustained progress on smoking was structuring the form on the Millennium electronic patient record to replicate the clinical advice that is scientifically proven to help smokers give up.
As well as building-in a pathway to the tobacco dependency service, the form also has prompts to offer nicotine replacement therapy or refer to community services.
Dr Ian Basnett, director of public health, said:
“The spectacular rise in recording smoking status is making a real impact on the health of our patients by enabling us to treat those who are addicted. This is truly innovative and means we are real leaders in the field of embedding health prevention in routine clinical care.”