Smoking is still a significant public health issue in Sweden although the proportion of smokers have decreased. During the last years, adverse effects such as infections due to smoking have been highlighted. Various initiatives have therefore been put in place to refer smokers to tobacco cessation before planned surgery. However, it has been difficult to achieve a workable care pathway from specialist care to primary care.
NEXit aims to develop and evaluate the effect of a SMS-based intervention for smoking cessation. Patients can sign up to the intervention during their visit to the specialist. This enables the patient to, in a simplified way, access smoking cessation support at an early stage.
The research project aims to adapt an existing 12 week SMS-based smoking cessation intervention to offer support to patients pre-operation. The intervention will be initially tested in a pilot study during 2016 upon revisions to the intervention will be made. A randomised study will be conducted during 2017-2018. This study will focus on patient outcomes and staff perceptions of referring patients to the intervention.
Previous research has shown that effective methods and interventions included in smoking cessation guidelines – can be applied and used in SMS interventions. Our research group have recently developed and tested a similar SMS intervention in a large randomised control trial. The findings showed that twice as many stopped smoking with SMS-support than without.
