Support to people wishing to stop smoking

Smoking cessation

Smoking cessation is one of the health care system's most cost-effective measures.

When a person decides to try to stop smoking, it is often because of changes in his/her immediate environment. Motivation to stop may, for example, stem from a ban on smoking at the workplace or on a decision to have children.

The Quit Smoking Line

The aim of the Quit Smoking Line is to offer a national smoking cessation service that is available to the whole country. The Quit Smoking Line is accessed via a special telephone number with a 020 prefix. This means that calls are as cheap as local calls, no matter where the call is made.

The Quit Smoking Line is continuously evaluated so as to be able to develop and improve the service. Since its launch in 1998, the Quit Smoking Line has answered more than 55 000 calls from the entire country and assisted in more than 20 000 attempts to stop smoking.

About 30 per cent of those using the Quit Smoking Line's services are still smoke-free one year after contacting the service. This can be compared with attempts made by smokers on their own, around 3 per cent of whom are still not smoking one year after their attempt. This means that the Quit Smoking Line can improve results tenfold, which leads to enormous health benefits to smokers and major financial benefits to society.

Information at antenatal clinics and child health care centres

Smoking during pregnancy and smoking in small children's environments present serious risks to the health of the child. Children are particularly sensitive to tobacco smoke because their immune systems are not fully developed and their respiratory passages are narrower. Children of parents who smoke also run a greater risk of starting to smoke themselves later on in life.

At the beginning of the 1980s, one-third of all pregnant women in Sweden smoked. During the 1990s, tobacco-prevention programmes have been developed in antenatal and child health care:

• new, specially adapted methods for constructive counselling with pregnant women smokers have been introduced,
• staff in antenatal and child health care have been trained in these methods.

Since 1992, the Swedish Cancer Society, the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation and the National Institute of Public Health have jointly been training midwives and children's nurses in the Smoke-free pregnancy/Smoke-free children counselling method. In June 2004, there were 148 instructors trained in this counselling method. The method focuses on discussing tobacco habits instead of pointing out how parents should behave. It is intended to inspire parents' confidence in their own ability to create a smoke-free environment for their children. The aim is to give children a tobacco-free start in life and to reduce parents' smoking. This initiative has gradually been developed to include both parents and information on the significance of the effect of other tobacco and nicotine products on the development of the foetus.

The proportion of smokers among pregnant women has markedly declined in parallel with the development of tobacco-prevention campaigns in antenatal and child health care, from around 25 per cent in the early 1990s to some 15 per cent in 2004. In 2004, half of these women stopped smoking in the three-month period prior to pregnancy and up until registration at antenatal clinics.