Background/Objectives: Since April 2006, smoking cessation treatment has been included in public health insurance coverage, although conditionally. The tobacco control program usually takes 12 weeks or so. When it comes to the form of treatment, most medical care facilities adopt nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) at their outpatient ward. The cessation success rates are considered not so high as before. In stead of treating nicotine-addict outpatients individually, our hospital has been offering a stop-smoking program all its own since 1999. This study was designed to examine the results of our efforts in the last six years retrospectively.Subjects/Methods: Enrolled for this study were 232 patients who had participated in our six-month smoking cessation program between 1999 and 2005. A non-smokingsupport team made up of a physician, pharmacist(s), nurses, dietitian(s) and physical therapist(s) takes care of groups of participating patients, each group consisting of 10 or less. The patients undergo behavior therapy throughout the 6-month period and NRT in the first eight weeks. Under the program, nutrition guidance is offered regularly by dietitians for weight control and physical exercises by physical therapists for relief from the stress due to abstinence from smoking. We took a questionnaire survey of all the subjects and worked out the ratios of those persons who had remained abstinent up to one year after they stopped smoking to the total.Results: The rates of abstinence maintained eight weeks, six months and one year after the start of cessation were 78.4%, 70.3% and 64.7%, respectively. Of those who were still abstinent, 78.0% replied that they found it easy to resist the urge to smoke cigarette thanks to the smoking cessation program.Conclusion: Our six-month participatory tobacco control program was found effective as high cessation rates were maintained.
Cessation of smoking ; seconds ; month ; week ; Smoking

Background and Objective  The Projects of Global Growth of Medical Technologies, implemented by NCGM since 2015, have contributed to human resource development through on-site training in partner countries and training in Japan. However, since 2020, online training has become mainstream due to the travel restrictions by COVID-19 impact. As one of the projects, the NCGM and Bach Mai Hospital rehabilitation departments in Vietnam held an interactive online hands-on seminar in FY2022 for Vietnamese occupational therapists and others to provide technical guidance for making splint orthoses to rehabilitate patients with hand dysfunction. This paper aims to report on the preparation and implementation process of the seminar and its results.Preparation and Implementation of the Seminar  NCGM (the instructor) and Bach Mai Hospital (the site of the hands-on training) prepared the seminar through regular online meetings, fostering ownership and collaborative planning on the Vietnamese side, and discussed the program development, necessary materials, participant selection, and obtaining authorization from the Vietnamese Ministry of Health. To ensure the quality of the technical instruction, the seminar was connected via Zoom to both NCGM and Bach Mai Hospital, where the live video of the splinting technique was conducted, along with explanations and Q&A sessions. The post-training evaluation was carried out through a questionnaire with self-assessment of the participants about the knowledge and skills they obtained. Outcome and Discussion  As a result, 96% (27/28) of the participants answered that the seminar was “useful for clinical practice,” suggesting that the interactive online hands-on seminar regarding technical instruction in making splint orthosis was as good as or better than the face-to-face training. We found that the Vietnamese side took ownership from the preparatory stage by establishing a regular online meeting system; the quality of the training was assured by live video by both sides, which enabled detailed technical instruction; the training provider’s skills were improved by more detailed preparation; training was cost-effective compared to on-site training or training in Japan; and the materials used and the training videos can be used as teaching materials, which is expected local benefits and sustainability. These findings can be applied to face-to-face training to make the training more effective and extended as a useful method when similar activities are developed in other countries.