Workplace Issues

Smoking Cessation

My work center is experiencing a major problem with our smoking cessaon classes provided for our patients. Smoking is a major public health issue because it causes or aggravates many serious illnesses. Effective intervention strategies for chronic smokers have been developed using principals of behavioral counseling. These principals are applicable to other risky health behaviors. Health behavior risk assessment and intervention is now an expected physician behavior for the comprehensive care of the adult. Selecting and performing an appropriate smoking cessation intervention is an important issue (CDC, 2005).

The fact that the health and wellness center provides smoking intervention for our patients is a good thing. Some of the positive things that are produced by our smoking program are, they provide patients with a tool to stop smoking. Our smoking programs also provides smokers an opportunity to meet and discuss their smoking habits with others, and finally the class educates all members on the seriousness of long-term smoking. The issue or problems that we are experiencing are centered around the lack of provider/facilitator support and issuing patient medications. My fear is that if we do not correct this problem patients will no longer attend the classes and we will experience an increase in the number of smokers resulting in increased patient admissions (Beavers, 2006).

Tobacco use remains the nation's leading preventable cause of premature death. Each year, more than 440,000 Americans die from disease caused by tobacco use, accounting for one in every five deaths. Cigarette smoking alone is responsible for more than 30% of cancer deaths annually in the U.S. and smoking is also an important cause of death from heart disease, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Currently, there are an estimated 44.5 million (21%) adult smokers and an estimated 3.75 million (22%) high school student smokers in the U.S. Cigarettes are the predominant form of tobacco consumed; however, other forms of tobacco, such as smokeless tobacco, cigars, and pipes, are also used. If the HAWC can provide a safe and effective smoking program we can have a positive effect on a small percentage of the 44.5 million smokers in the United States (CDC, 2005).

Now that we have identified the problem as a provider/facilitator problem with our classes we must now implement a get well plan. We plan to comprise a team of providers, facilitators and HAWC staff to discuss the problems. The model that we plan to use is the (Plan, Do, Check, Act,) model. Plan: Identify the process or segment of a process which can be improve ed with the expectation of safer, higher quality medical care; flow chart and clarify the process; evaluate and analyze the process; understand the problems and identify the risk points (concentrate on the human factors, process and systems issues that may cause the process to fail); determine is this risk acceptable,