The Office on Health Disparities released the APA Smoke Screen app for health professionals to help their clients quit smoking.
More than 480,000 deaths per year in the U.S. can be attributed to smoking-related illnesses. While smoking rates in the U.S. overall have gone down, several of our most vulnerable populations have not experienced the same reductionsopens in new window.
With support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center (SCLC) at University of California, San Francisco, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others, the Health Disparities Office (HDO) has disseminated resources to help professionals reduce smoking in their patients from health priority populations.
- The APA Smoke Screen app (free; iOS, Android), developed with funding from AHRQ and released in 2016, is a resource on tobacco-related health disparities among underserved populations.
- With the CDC's Tips from Former Smokers campaign, HDO cosponsored with Morehouse School of Medicine a webinar, "Treating Patients with Mental Health Issues Who Use Tobacco," featuring David Satcher, PhD, and Timothy Carmody, PhD, and shared CDC-developed resources for mental health professionals.
- HDO continued working with SCLC and the Health Equity Ambassadors to fund 32 events on smoking cessation in health disparity populations such as LGBT, rural, racial/ethnic minority students, formerly incarcerated individuals and others. Among the 635 participants who submitted post-event evaluations, 64.3 percent strongly agreed and 20.4 percent agreed that they were motivated to stop or not begin smoking.
For more on the Smoke Screen app, see the November APA Monitor on Psychology, and for more on APA's partnership with the CDC, see the June APA Monitor on Psychology.