General practitioners and smoking prevention

Abstract

The purpose of the study described here was to develop a model for analysing the various strategies that are available to assist general practitioners to reduce smoking among their patients. The scenario analysis involves four steps. The first is to identify the opportunities for detection, intervention and efficacy and to express them as a decision process. The second step is to assign probabilities to each node in the decision process. During the third step, the outcomes for current (base case) levels of decision, intervention and efficacy are estimated, and a number of scenarios in which these rates are increased are drawn up. The final step is a ‘break-even’ analysis of the outcomes of the scenarios. The results are expressed in a table which emphasizes incremental differences between strategies for detection, intervention and efficacy.