In Denmark there is a social gradient in smoking and this is showing in the statistics on smok-ing related disease and deaths.
From 2014 to 2017 7 projects led by civil society organisations received a national grant to work with smoking cessation. The purpose was to test what happens when organisations that do not normally work with smoking cessation work with recruitment and counseling of heavy smokers.
Answers to the following questions were sought in the project:
- Would it e possible to recruit a group of heavy smokers that the regular smoking cessation offers funded by municipalities and the government traditionally have difficulty in reach-ing?
- Would the organisations be able to help the group to stop smoking?
The organisations behind the projects had very different experiences in working with smoking cessation. Their specific target groups were also different, i.e. homeless persons with a (for-mer) drinking problem, socially vulnerable and workers who work in shifts.
Despite the differences some commonalities can be drawn from the projects:
It is important to:
- Have staff support - when working in settings focused on the socially vulnerable, as the staff often themselves are smokers, smoke breaks are used as a pedagogical tool and the approach tend to be that the socially vulnerable have more important and pressing issues than smoking
- Have support from management
- Support from experienced counsellors
- Set-up supervision for the counsellors as other issues surface during the counselling
- Combine the smoking cessation with other offers, i.e. counselling on exercise and healthy nutrition, suggestions for other activities than smoking, a “stop smoking” buddy and coun-selling outside the actual cessation session.