Hi and thank you for visiting our Smoking Cessation Poster during the WSPA Northwest Pharmacy Convention. We wanted to continue the conversation with a behind-the-scenes look at what brought this poster project about.
1. What was the challenge?
To improve smoking cessation rates by targeting patients who are in a setting with a “teachable moments” who may be more vulnerable to an intervention than the general population
2. What are we doing about this challenge?
Developing a tobacco cessation program aligned with clinical practice guidelines and establishing a novel referral source to increase patient access in the community setting
3. What is the expected outcome?
We expect to increase the rate of successful quit attempts by targeting patients with teachable moments
MORE GREAT INFO:
• Surgery is a big deal! If you’re choosing to undergo surgery you’ve likely just taken a huge step in improving your health.
• In addition to surgery, smokers have to worry about postoperative complications like blood clots, poor wound healing, pulmonary complications, and that’s in addition to the things they are already worried about like COPD, heart disease, and the big one, cancer.
• So at what point in your life are you more vulnerable than in the perioperative setting? When you’re considering the possibility of any one of these things happening?
• As the pharmacy resident here at Kelly Ross Pharmacy Group I’ve been given the opportunity to find these teachable moments where we as health care providers can make a lasting and impressionable impact on a patient’s life. And that’s what we have tried to do with our tobacco cessation program.
• The most successful tobacco cessation interventions come when you blend counseling with medications. And who better to do this than a pharmacist? Not only are we trained as the drug experts but we have the compassion and empathy necessary to forge and sustain long-lasting relationships with our patients.
• And this is why we will be successful. Maybe we get 5, 10, 50, or even 100 people to stop smoking. But what if we save a life? That’s what’s really important and that’s why we do it and I know that’s why I became a pharmacist
