Adherence makes perfect: Improving the adherence of practice nurses to smoking cessation guidelines

Smoking cessation advice from the general practice leads to significant effects on cessation rates. Adherence to smoking cessation guidelines by practice nurses is often suboptimal in primary care. Computer tailoring is an effective way to influence the determinants that predict adherence. The goal is to develop and test a computer-tailored e-learning intervention for practice nurses to improve their adherence to STIMEDIC, a recently disseminated but underused Dutch smoking cessation guideline.

Computer tailoring is an effective way to influence the determinants that predict adherence. One of practice nurses’ main tasks is to counsel patients wanting to change their lifestyle; therefore it is hypothesized that at baseline most practice nurses already adhere to at least 1 of the 7 STIMEDIC steps (provide quit advice). Due to measurement effects we expect an increase in adherence in the control group to adherence to 2 steps, while we estimate that the web-based computer-tailored intervention will yield adherence to 4 steps.

baseline questionnaire and six and twelve month follow-up questionnaire

web-based computer-tailored intervention for practice nurses