Strategies to improve stop-smoking support in primary care

This review found moderate‐certainty evidence that adjunctive counselling (delivered by a health professional other than the primary care physician), cost‐free medications and tailored print materials all had a beneficial impact on smoking quit rates. However, a beneficial impact of adjunctive counselling was only evident when offered in addition to standard smoking cessation care.

There was only low‐certainty evidence that biomedical feedback and provider training, and very low‐certainty evidence that provider incentives, had any clear beneficial impact on smoking cessation in this setting.

While there was some evidence of an improvement in some of the markers of physician performance in response to physician training, this did not translate into patient quit attempts.