Third-year Miller School student Lauren Prats is one of five national winners of the American College of Physicians' research poster competition for a smoking cessation program she helped revive and improve at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Prats' poster, "Consult to Quit: Smoking Intervention at a Large Public Hospital," was recognized by internal medicine's leading professional organization at its Internal Medicine 2010 annual conference in Toronto last month.
"I was really excited and very surprised,'' Prats said of the honor. "So many people had such great work on biomarkers, or with rat studies - that sort of thing - so I was really shocked they would choose a quality-improvement trial. The best part was that so many health care professionals from across the country were asking how they could incorporate such a program in their respective hospitals and clinics!''
In just ten months, Prats, in collaboration with the University of Miami Area Health Education Center (AHEC) and six UM and Jackson Memorial physicians, helped 327 smokers kick the deadly habit, thanks to a successful cessation program they developed after discovering that few people knew about, must less used, an existing program at Jackson.
Paul Méndez, M.D., associate professor of medicine and assistant dean of clinical curriculum, noted that Prats is the second Miller School student in a row to win an award at the college's national meeting, and that three of her collaborators are Miller School graduates who became involved in smoking cessation projects as students.
"I am happy to see they have continued those efforts during their training, and I am confident Lauren will remain just as dedicated,'' Mendez said. "We're very proud that the Miller School is one of the top schools in the nation in terms of community service activities, and seeing this project flower from a seed planted years ago is very rewarding to us as educators.''
Prats' collaborators are project leader Asma Aftab, M.D., M.P.H., research assistant professor of family medicine and community health and assistant director of the AHEC Tobacco Program; Venkat Kalidindi, M.D., assistant professor of clinical medicine; residents Sondra Aiken, M.D., Damien Hansra, M.D., and Deepika Aneja, M.D., all Miller School graduates; and resident Carlos Kummerfeldt, M.D.
In their research, they found that 78 percent of Jackson's nurses were unaware of the hospital's existing cessation program, rendering it, as Prats said, "essentially non-existent and ineffective."
Setting out to improve the program's efficacy and visibility, Prats and her collaborators devised a program where smoking cessation counselors met with patients interested in quitting, provided them nicotine replacement therapy, counseled them on methods for quitting and linked them with out-patient smoking cessation programs upon discharge - all for free.
Between October 2008 and July 2009, 1,366 patients received counseling and 519 of them attended smoking cessation classes. Of those who quit after completing the classes, 327 had not resumed smoking six months later.
"That gives us a 63 percent quit rate, which our research shows is phenomenal,'' Prats said. "Smoking cessation programs like Quitline have a 30 percent quit rate after six months, and going ‘cold turkey' has a quit rate of less than 5 percent.''
The cessation project was soon followed by another remarkable AHEC achievement - the smoke-free campus policy that, as of March 1, banned smoking anywhere on the Miller School/Jackson campus.
"In the case of smokers, you have to set a good example, and what better example than to remove smoking from the hospital setting?'' Prats said.
