You are a nurse working in a busy inpatient medical surgical unit. The patients on your unit are admitted for a wide variety of conditions: renal, GI, dermatologic, etc.
All patients admitted that are chronic smokers are given brief counseling by an RN and a self-help brochure about smoking cessation, but no follow up counseling after that.
You hear your coworkers complaining that they feel like they are wasting their time because they think the patients will resume smoking after discharge.
You decide you want to find out if this minimal contact intervention works in the long term.
P: Consider when choosing your patient/problem
What are the most important characteristics?
Relevant demographic factors
The setting
I: Consider for your intervention
What is the main intervention, treatment, diagnostic test, procedure, or exposure?
Think of dosage, frequency, duration, and mode of delivery
C: Consider for your comparison
Inactive control intervention: Placebo, standard care, no treatment
Active control intervention: A different drug, dose, or kind of therapy
O: Consider for your outcome
Be specific and make it measurable
It can be something objective or subjective
PICO: Putting it together
Your full PICO question is:
Among hospitalized chronic smokers, does a brief educational nursing intervention lead to long term smoking cessation [when compared with no intervention]?
