Nurses are key to providing the individual help and support necessary to help patients quit smoking, and a nurse’s intervention to help a patient stop smoking may be the most important single influence on his or her health. This article shows how nurses working in primary care can increase the quality and quantity of their interventions with smokers

Aims and intended learning outcomes

This article aims to review the impact of smoking on public health and the evidence best practice for assisting smokers to give up. After reading this article you should be able to: