Background: Health professionals are seen as a respected source of information and are ideally placed to deliver smoking cessation advice to their patients. Evidence shows that even brief advice provided by a health professional can help smokers quit. Quit Victoria provides a range of training programs to encourage health professionals, as part of routine care, to advise and support patients to quit, and give them information about services and products available.

Strategy: Quit's training programs are tailored to suit the health professionals' daily practice and patient needs. Sessions cover smoking behaviour, quitting strategies, pharmacotherapy, the 5As and motivational interviewing. Some sessions also have professional development points allocated. Quit recognises that time is a limited commodity, and for health professionals not in a position to provide ongoing cessation support, training highlights a fax-referral process to Quitline. Quit has conducted approximately 1280 training sessions since 2004 to support health professionals; evaluation shows that what is provided is relevant and useful. A three-month follow up survey conducted in 2006 provided valuable feedback.

Conclusion: Health professionals face challenges in smoking cessation intervention. Quit's training is contributing to their cessation work. Most participants who responded to the three-month survey felt the session was sufficient for them to begin using the 5As framework. Of those participating in Quit's 2 day Educator Training, most felt able to run Quit courses. There were a number of recommendations including producing a newsletter and sending email reminders to help increase the numbers of fax referrals received by the Quitline. Quit is addressing these.