This spring, Sechelt's St. Mary's Hospital will kick off a smoking cessation program for in-patients who opt to participate.
"People are motivated when they're in hospitals to quit [smoking], because often they've had a heart attack or they're in hospital for a smoking-related disease," said Leah Hawirko, program director for the Centre of Excellence for Clinical Smoking Cessation. "So it's an ideal time to assess a person's willingness to quit."
And nicotine addiction, she said, is no small problem. Every year 45,000 Canadians will die from smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease.
"That's the equivalent of something like 700 jumbo jets going down. It's a crazy number of people, and we just kind of let it go," Hawirko said.
But the hospital-based smoking cessation program, pioneered at the Ottawa Heart Institute and now expanding across Canada, is looking to tackle smoking addiction head on. The program, known as the Ottawa Model, starts by screening new in-patients for tobacco use.
This, Hawirko said, helps establish if beyond the illness or injury for which they've been hospitalized patients are also going through nicotine withdrawal. If they are, they're offered options such as nicotine-replacement therapy. This not only raises the standard of care for patients, but allows them to seriously envision quitting.
"Often what we find is that when a person is well taken care of and comfortable and not in withdrawal, they suddenly start to see that it is possible to quit," she said. "And so at that point we say, here's an option: we can help you quit long term."
Interested patients are given a "Quit Kit," with a range of pamphlets covering both physical and psychological aspects of the addiction, plus strategies and resources for quitting. Once patients are out of hospital, the program provides automated telephone follow up at three days, seven days, 14 days and then monthly for up to six months. The automated calls work as a triage system to ascertain if a patient needs a follow-up call from a tobacco educator.
And the Ottawa Model's success rates in other jurisdictions have been telling.
Generally, she said, only five per cent of smokers trying to quit will still be off cigarettes a year later. But with this program, a whole hospital will achieve a 30 per cent quit rate in a year, and a cardiac facility will achieve a 50 per cent quit rate.
Locally, tobacco reduction co-ordinator Ely Weston said St. Mary's is starting to screen patients for tobacco use this week prior to rolling out the full program in the spring. This will allow the hospital to both gather baseline data against which the program success can be assessed, and to iron out kinks in how the screening is done.
And while Hawirko said the program is "not rocket science," she stressed its crucial impact on participants' health.
"It's tremendously important," Hawirko said. "We can mess with medications, we can mess with disease management, but if you're a smoker, quitting smoking is the most important thing you can do."
