Does support and intervention from nurses help people to stop smoking?

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Does support and intervention from nurses help people to stop smoking?

Updated
Authors: 
Rice V, Heath L, Livingstone-Banks J, Hartmann-Boyce J

Background

Most smokers want to quit, and may be helped by advice and support from healthcare professionals. Nurses are the largest healthcare workforce, and are involved in virtually all levels of health care. The main aim of this review was to determine if nursing-delivered interventions can help adult smokers to stop smoking.

Study characteristics

This review of clinical trials covered 58 studies in which nurses delivered a stop-smoking intervention to smokers. More than 20,000 participants were included in the main analysis, including hospitalized adults and adults in the general community. The most recent search was conducted in January 2017. All studies reported whether or not participants had quit smoking at six months or longer.

Key Results

This review found moderate-quality evidence that advice and support from nurses could increase people’s success in quitting smoking, whether in hospitals or in community settings. Eleven studies compared different nurse-delivered interventions and did not find that adding more components changed the effect.

Quality of evidence

The quality of evidence was moderate, meaning that further research may change our confidence in the result. This is because results were not consistent across all of the studies, and in some cases there were not very many studies contributing to comparisons.

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