Guidance
This guideline covers helping people to stop smoking in acute, maternity and mental health services. It promotes smokefree policies and services and recommends effective ways to help people stop smoking or to abstain from smoking while using or working in secondary care settings.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- identifying people who smoke and offering help to stop, including intensive support in acute and mental health services, and maternity services
- providing information and advice for carers, family, other household members and hospital visitors
- advising on and providing stop smoking pharmacotherapies, and making these available in hospital
- adjusting drug dosages for people who have stopped smoking
- putting referral systems in place for people who smoke
- developing smokefree policies and commissioning smokefree secondary care services
- supporting staff to stop smoking and providing stop smoking training for frontline staff
Who is it for?
- Health and social care professionals, including clinical leads in secondary care services and managers of clinical services
- Commissioners, leaders of the local health and care system and Trust boards
- Estate managers and other managers
- People using secondary care services and their families and carers
Is this guideline up to date?
We checked the recommendations in this guideline in March 2017 and it will be amalgamated by the committee into a single tobacco guideline which combines the tobacco suite of guidelines.
See the guideline in development page for progress on the update.
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
This guideline partially updates NICE guideline PH10 (published February 2008).
This guideline was previously called smoking cessation in secondary care: acute, maternity and mental health services.
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.