Get the Tobacco Cessation Change Package

The Tobacco Cessation Change Package (TCCP) is a quality improvement tool created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that:

• Is intended for health care professionals in outpatient, inpatient, and behavioral health settings and public health professionals who partner with these groups.

• Presents a list of process improvements that clinicians can implement as they seek to deliver optimal treatment to patients who use tobacco.              
• Gives clinical teams a practical resource to increase the reach and effectiveness of tobacco cessation interventions and to incorporate these interventions into the clinical workflow.

How Should We Use the Tobacco Cessation Change Package?

Start by bringing together a multidisciplinary team of stakeholders (e.g., physicians, pharmacists, nurses, medical assistants, social workers, care managers, quality improvement coordinators, health informaticians, and administrators).

The team can look at the elements in Figure 1  and conduct an assessment to determine the aspects of tobacco dependence treatment that are most in need of improvement in your health system. You may also benefit from talking directly with others who have undertaken similar efforts to learn from their experience.

Once your team has identified and prioritized the needs, interventions can be selected from the TCCP to create a supportive treatment environment to address those needs.

You can then choose strategies from the TCCP that have been shown to result in improvement. Each strategy you choose should first be tested on a small scale (i.e., conduct a “small test of change”) to assess feasibility and allow the team to evaluate and adjust before instituting the change on a broader, more permanent scale.

Health care practices should not attempt to implement all the interventions described in the TCCP at once, nor is it likely that all of these interventions will be applicable to every clinical setting.

TCCP Format

The TCCP is composed of change concepts, change ideas, and tools and resources:

• Change concepts are general notions that are useful for developing more specific strategies for changing a process.
• Change ideas are actionable, specific ideas or strategies that can be rapidly tested on a small scale to determine whether they result in improvements in the local environment.
• Each change idea is linked to evidence- or practice-based tools and resources that can be adopted or adapted to implement each change idea.