In Japan, the current smoker rate in tuberculosis (TB) patients is higher than that of the general population. The data show that more than half of them keep smoking throughout their treatment period. The systematic smoking cessation support for TB patients has never been addressed in the Japan’s TB control program until now. While a patient is under treatment, a public health nurse (PHN) visits the patient at least once a month to check if the medicine is being taken regularly. But nurses so far have not paid attention to the smoking habit of their patients for fear that it might affect human relationship. International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases published the guidebook, “Smoking Cessation and Smoke-free Environment for TB Patients” in 2010. Based on this, we have developed the “TB Patients’ Smoking Cessation Support Manual” Japanese version in 2017. This study tries to evaluate the program of this manual, so that its achievements will become a cornerstone of new tobacco cessation support program for TB patients.
The purpose of this study is to strengthen motivation of PHNs toward smoking cessation support, and to assess coverage of smoking cessation support and its outcomes among patients in the health center areas where the program of the above Manual is practiced.
The direct target of the study is PHNs who work at a total of 137 public health centers from 52 municipalities volunteering to collaborate with us. All the TB patients newly registered in the collaborating municipalities are given “ABC guidance” by PHNs; “Ask” about smoking, followed by “Brief advices” for smokers and passive smokers, and then “Cessation support” for smokers who want to quit smoking. The study period is from July, 2018 to December, 2019. We will introduce a part of data in the presentation on site.