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Poster presentation:
The smoking cessation pyramid
Renee Bittoun
Abstract
In many countries around the world there have been dramatic spontaneous reductions in smoking when governments have committed to strong anti-smoking campaigns. In Australia, educating smokers about the health consequences of smoking through the media, health warnings on tobacco products, the banning of all tobacco advertising, increasing the cost of tobacco through taxation and strong laws prohibiting environmental tobacco smoke exposure have played the most important roles in changing the smoking behaviour of smokers and discouraging its uptake. The current adult smoking prevalence rate of 18% is internationally regarded as highly successful. There is evidence that the steady drop in smoking prevalence has begun to plateau. This may be due to the remaining smoking target becoming harder to treat. Increasingly a role has developed for intensive and individualized pharmacological interventions to aid this harder target. The pyramid is a model designed to describe a hierarchy of smoking cessation. At the bottom of the pyramid are the broader strategies that may help less dependent smokers quit spontaneously while at the top are the more intensive approaches that may be required for the more heavily dependent smoker who has already made multiple attempts to quit and may be impervious to the broader strategies. This model may help describe the roles that public health and clinical practice play in smoking cessation.
Biography
Has worked in Smoking Cessation for > 25 years. Set up first Smokers' Clinic in Australia at St.Vincent's Hospital, Sydney in 1979. Currently Director of the Smokers' Clinics, Central Sydney Area Health Service, Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Smoking Cessation Unit at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and Clinical Associate in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Sydney. She is the author of several books on smoking and quitting both for the public and as texts and many research articles on smoking cessation. She established first university course on Nicotine Addiction and Smoking Cessation Course at University of Sydney and is President of AASCP, The Australian Association of Smoking Cessation Professionals.
Renee Bittoun
Director Smokers Clinics, Smoking Research Unit, University of Sydney and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
University of Sydney, D06
Sydney
2006
Australia
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