From the Editorial Director

It comes around only once a year. You know about it, yet perhaps forget to take action until it’s already well under way. Maybe you have difficulty developing materials and deciding how to share information with patients. This October, National Dental Hygiene Month (NDHM) can-and should-be different!

Sponsored by the American Dental Hygienists’ Association (ADHA), the 2004 theme for NDHM is tobacco cessation. Since dental hygienists are on the frontline of defense against oral diseases, we play a key role in educating patients about the numerous physical, mental, and financial disparities brought on by tobacco use. Some facts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

• Tobacco use causes more than 442,000 deaths (approximately 178,000 women; 264,000 men) each year in the United States.
• Cigarettes kill more people than alcohol, illegal drugs, car accidents, suicide, homicide, and AIDS combined.
•  75% of oral cancer cases are preventable and up to 90% are treatable if detected early.

ADHA has launched a new tobacco cessation initiative this year called “Ask. Advise. Refer.” Made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Smoking Cessation Leadership Center, the initiative provides educational and promotional materials to help dental hygienists get the word out about the dangers of tobacco use. Numerous resources, such as a press release template to individualize with your name and practice information, public service announcements, and more are available to ADHA members online at www.adha.org. In addition, contact information for the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center and state quitline information can be found at www.askadviserefer.org. An educational poster for the operatory, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, can also be downloaded at this site.

The advice of a health care professional can more than double smoking cessation success rates, so know that you can and do make a difference. If you feel overwhelmed or unqualified to assist patients in quitting tobacco use, ADHA has developed a complete protocol and script to follow. This document is a set of instructions on how to perform the “Ask. Advise. Refer.” program and was prepared with the dental hygienist in mind. The entire procedure takes 3 minutes or less-not much time to have a huge impact on someone’s life.

Three minutes or less CAN save lives. Ask patients if they use tobacco. Advise them to quit. Refer them to resources that can help.

-Jill Rethman, RDH, BA, editorial director
jrethman@belmontpublications.com