Staying quit after the hospital
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Hospitals are smoke-free – as you’d expect from facilities that treat diseases caused by smoking. For smokers, a hospital stay can start a quit smoking program.
With this in mind, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital looked at data on almost 400 smokers who wanted to stay quit. Half got in-hospital counseling and medications; the rest got recommendations on how to quit. All were followed for six months.
Researcher Nancy Rigotti says the extra care increased the quit rate by 70 percent:
“We know that medication works and that counseling works, but they both together work much better than either one alone.”
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.