Many healthcare providers are quick to advise patients to quit smoking, but few follow up with programs, plans or prescriptions to help them break the habit, new research from University of California Davis has found. In the most comprehensive national study of its kind, Elisa K. Tong of the Division of General Medicine at UC Davis, reported that health professionals in the United States do not fully follow national guidelines for working with patients who use tobacco products. The study appeared online this month in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, and will be published in the July issue of the journal.

Tong and colleagues surveyed seven groups of health professionals whom smokers are most likely to encounter: primary-care physicians, emergency-medicine physicians, psychiatrists, registered nurses, dentists, dental hygienists and pharmacists. They set out to determine the respondents’ smoking status and also to examine whether they perform the “5 A’s” with patients: asking, advising, assessing, assisting and arranging follow-up about tobacco use. They found that up to 99 percent of health professionals report that they ask patients and almost as many advise them about smoking risks. But far fewer help them get the help they need to quit. For example, among registered nurses, 87 percent reported asking if a patient smokes, and 65 percent said they advise smokers to quit. But only 25 percent of respondents reported assisting smokers to set a quit date.

“We know that provider advice is one of the simplest and most important things to help a smoker to try to quit and stay quit,” said Tong. “Providers are not doing enough. It should be a priority for all health professionals, not just primary-care physicians.”

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