Centre for Tobacco Dependent Patients, Charles University in Prague, First Faculty of Medicine |
The Centre is part of the 3rd Medical Department – Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague and General University Hospital in Prague, Czech Republic. Our centre works full time since 2005 serving smokers who want to stop. We are based at medical department of a large university hospital, so majority of our patients comes from this surroundings, but also recommended by other physicians or by our former patients. Our team consists of 3 physicians and two nurses. After the appointment, the first (screening) visit takes about one hour – mostly it means basic measures, assessing the level of tobacco dependence and psychiatric comorbidity including complete medical history. Then the main psycho-social-behavioural intervention (about 2 hours) is performed during the next visit. The rest of visits are controls taking about 30 minutes. We follow our patients one year since the last cigarette. The mean number of visits during this year is 7. In the frame of the Society for Treatment of Tobacco Dependence we collaborate with now about 30 similar centres across the country. Under methodology and guidelines also recommendation for treatment of tobacco dependent adolescents are formulated and some of those centres collaborate in treatment of adolescents. In our centre, currently only about 1 % of patients (20 from more than 2,000) are younger than 18 years. We hope to increase this proportion due to seminars we organize and due to the ACCESS project.
Alexandra Kmetova
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