The Moncton Hospital takes up smoking cessation
Wednesday October 17, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Carol Morey says The Moncton Hospital’s participation in the Safer Healthcare Now (SHN) Campaign’s Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) intervention has forced the organization to develop a formal smoking cessation program.

As a result, Morey, the administrative director of emergency and internal medicine, says every patient that passes through the doors of The Moncton Hospital’s cardiac department is screened as part of the program.

The Moncton Hospital is a community hospital under the umbrella of the South-East Regional Health Authority (SERHA) in New Brunswick. SERHA is a Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) subscriber.

According to SHN, one of the components of successful AMI intervention is an effective smoking cessation program. AMI is a sudden loss of blood supply to an area of the heart that causes permanent heart damage or death.

“Every single patient that comes into the cardiac department will be asked by a nurse if they smoke or not, advise them that it’s best not to, and then give them information about what they can do if they want to quit,” Morey says.

The patient is then automatically referred to the smoking cessation program and has that fact documented. Morey says previously there was no process in place where patients were asked 100 per cent of the time if they’re a smoker.

“It wasn’t set up as an expectation of the nurses to do this every time,” Morey says. “We knew when we implemented something it had to be quick and easy because of time constraints.”

The Moncton Hospital’s search for an evidence-based smoking cessation program led them to the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO).

Barbara Hennessey, The Moncton Hospital’s team lead for AMI and a clinical nurse specializing in cardiology, says tools made available by the RNAO helped educate staff nurses about the implementation of a quick and effective smoking cessation program.

“We actually created a process that ensured that we co-ordinated all of their approaches together and then we created an automatic referral to our smoking cessation program,” Hennessey says. “It created a nice tiered approach that co-ordinated continuous patient care from in-patient to out-patient.

Thanks to the RNAO’s best practices, Morey says The Moncton Hospital is now 100 per cent compliant with the smoking cessation aspect of the AMI intervention.

“This program that we borrowed from the RNAO is quick - it takes the nurse 15 seconds,” Morey says.

For more information on the RNAO’s smoking cessation program, visit www.rnao.org.