Many community mental health professionals lack the training and expertise they need to deliver smoking cessation interventions and to prescribe appropriate medications to help people quit, according to a report from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), which is supported by MHNA through its membership of the Mental Health and Smoking Partnership.
‘Smokefree skills: Community mental health’ reports on an ASH survey of mental health professionals (nurses and psychiatrists) working in the community. It found that there is low awareness of very brief advice (VBA) among mental health nurses and psychiatrists, and that prescribing medications for smoking cessation is not common practice among community mental health professionals. The analysis also found that a substantial proportion of nurses and psychiatrists reported they had not had any training in smoking cessation. ASH argues these issues need to be addressed to help to close the gap in smoking prevalence between people with mental health conditions and the wider population.
However, 88% of mental health nurses and 85% of psychiatrists who responded to the survey said that they both asked and recorded clients’ smoking status in line with the first step of the VBA model. VBA is a model of support designed for opportunistic use by healthcare professionals in order to trigger a quit attempt among smokers.