The impact of smoking cessation practitioners' smoking history, training and attitudes on self-reported quit rates

Smoking rates in England have fallen to their lowest rate in over eighty years1 despite this reduction, smoking remains UK’s biggest preventable cause of premature illness and mortality2. It has been acknowledged that specialist Stop Smoking support programmes have helped reduce smoking prevalence3. However, service uptake and quit rates vary dramatically particularly within London4. There has, been little research into the reasons for these variances. This study aimed to explore potential variables contributing to the variability and collated information on: advisor smoking status (historic and current), attitude towards smoking, and number of patients recruited onto the stop smoking programme, to assess what impact, if any, they had on clinical effectiveness. This study implemented a quantitative cross-sectional survey design, consisting of Stop Smoking advisors (n=159) from 24 London boroughs. A regression analysis was carried out using an ordinal logistic regression. It was found that proportion of time spent delivering stop smoking support was the only significant variable that positively impacted on self-reported quit rate with an odds ratio of 1.32 (95% CI, 0.78 to 0.48), Wald χ2 (1) = 45.816, p < 0.05. The regression model showed no significant impact of the other variables investigated. This study concludes that tobacco status - current or previous - is not shown to affect smoking cessation practitioner success rate. This result could help to encourage the ethos that smoking cessation advisors do not have to have been smokers in order to be effective at providing support and reinforces the need for specialist support services as previously suggested 5.