By Rod Rose
Assistant Managing Editor
Boone County — A local pediatrician and her nurse are “working out the kinks” for the launch in November of a program that would encourage parents to stop smoking, thereby reducing the exposure of their children to secondhand smoke.
Boone is the first Indiana county to begin the program, Dr. Sarah S. Bosslet told the Boone County Healthy Coalition Wednesday.
Called CEASE — clinical effort against secondhand smoke exposure — the program was developed by the Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
CEASE, Dr. Bosslet said, explored ways to reduce children’s exposure to second hand smoke by interviewing parents, offering the adults counseling, “and, effectively, to get them to quit.”
The six-month CEASE program provides information and assistance to kick the tobacco habit, Dr. Bosslet said.
Often it takes “just a couple of weeks” to get the parent “excited or committed” to stop smoking, she said. Parents will also hopefully recognize how much money they are saving by not buying cigarettes.
While CEASE has been studied in what Dr. Bosslet called “an academic center,” it has never, she said, been conducted in a community clinical setting.
She has received a grant from the American Academy of Pediatrics to help with the study, Dr. Bosslet said.
“We’re very excited,” Dr. Bosslet said. “This is the first clinical implementation anywhere; if we can convince a community physician to do this, it’s huge,” she said.
She hopes for two major accomplishments: To have information collected during the clinical trial incorporated into an electronic medical system already in use by Witham Health Services, and to reduce the number of parents who smoke.
“We’re a growing pediatrics group,” Dr. Bosslet said. “We have some time to try to get this started.”
See Friday's Reporter for the complete story.
