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Systematic Review
To assess the effectiveness of interventions delivered by community pharmacy personnel to assist people to stop smoking, with or without concurrent use of pharmacotherapy.
The authors identified seven studies including 1774 participants. They judged three studies to be at high risk of bias and four to be at unclear risk. Each study provided face-to-face behavioural support delivered by pharmacy staff, and required pharmacy personnel training. Typically such programmes comprised support starting before quit day and continuing with weekly appointments for several weeks afterwards. Comparators were either minimal or less intensive behavioural support for smoking cessation, typically comprising a few minutes of oneoff advice on how to quit. Participants in both intervention and control arms received equivalent smoking cessation pharmacotherapy in all but one study. All studies took place in high-income countries, and recruited participants visiting pharmacies. The authors pooled six studies of 1614 participants and detected a benefit of more intensive behavioural smoking cessation interventions delivered by community pharmacy personnel compared with less intensive cessation interventions at longest follow-up (RR 2.30, 95% CI 1.33 to 3.97; I2 = 54%; low-certainty evidence).
Community pharmacists can provide effective behavioural support to people trying to stop smoking. However, this conclusion is based on low-certainty evidence, limited by risk of bias and imprecision. Further research could change this conclusion.