Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ph5wq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T16:31:32.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What General Practitioners Can Do to Deliver More Brief Stop-Smoking Interventions: An Exploratory Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

Florian Vogt*
Affiliation:
Health Psychology Section, Department of Psychology, King's College London, United Kingdom. florian.vogt@kcl.ac.uk
Andy McEwen
Affiliation:
Centre for Outcomes Research and Effectiveness, Department of Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom.
Susan Michie
Affiliation:
Cancer Research UK Health Behavior Research Centre, Department of Epidemiology & Public Health, University College London, United Kingdom.
*
*Address for correspondence: Dr Florian Vogt, Health Psychology Section, Department of Psychology, King's College London, 5th Floor, Thomas Guy House, Guy's Campus, London SE1 9RT.

Abstract

Guidelines recommend that general practitioners (GPs) should advise all smoking patients to quit and provide additional stop-smoking interventions as appropriate. This study aimed to improve our understanding of how this recommendation can be achieved. General practitioners (N = 26) from London completed a questionnaire about their stop-smoking interventions and psychological factors that might affect these. Thirty-one per cent of the patients recognised as smokers by GPs did not receive an intervention and two-thirds of these were judged to be inappropriate for receipt of an intervention. Psychological factors that predicted behaviour were perceptions that doing this was ‘normative’, making an effort to make it happen, and feeling that the behaviour was easy to enact. Strategies to improve guideline implementation may be more effective if they addressed the above psychological factors.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)