Organisational Strategies

Your organisation can support people to quit smoking by putting in place strategies that de-normalise smoking and further encourage staff to support clients to quit. Tailoring interventions to be relevant for the people and the organisation can be important. To implement new strategies follow an easy 3 step approach - plan, implement and monitor.

Plan

Consult with staff

Consultation is important early in the planning process to achieve stakeholder buy-in. Identifying who you are going to talk to, what you are going to ask and how you are going to ask it is important. Consultation can take many forms - surveys, team meetings, focus groups, informal meetings etc.

Complete a smoke check

Complete a smoke check to understand your current situation and opportunities for improvement. This will help you identify priority strategies to implement within your organisation. Click here to complete a smoke check.

Build a business case

A business case allows you to think through what you intend to do, why and how are you are going to do it and how you will manage it. The business case typically highlights:

• The background to why smoking is an issue both within your organisation and for your clients - including reference to your organisation’s mission and values may help with this.
• An outline of your planned strategies
• How your planned strategies will be beneficial for your organisation
• The resources required to make the changes, including any financial investment
• The timeline to complete it
• How you plan to communicate the strategies throughout its implementation and to whom you will target
• A description of the evaluation methods – how you will determine if your approach has been successful

Gain senior management support

Senior managers are important in supporting and communicating the benefits of the strategies you are planning to implement, helping to legitimise the strategy at all levels within the organisation to ensure its sustainability. They can assist with smoothing the way through any barriers you may face, managing the necessary human resources, and ensuring any funding that is required is maintained.

Implement

The strategy you choose to implement will be dependent on your organisation's needs and capacity. They may include:

Policies and Environment

Implementing or reviewing your smoke free policy shows your commitment to creating an environment that is supportive of non-smokers and people trying to quit. Offering practical support and guidelines to staff who smoke in conjunction with a smoke free environment offers a supportive environment for staff to quit and stay quit, and further protects clients from being exposed to tobacco.

A completely smoke free environment will provide the most support for clients and staff. However, your service may decide that initially, it will not be completely smoke free but will have a plan in place to gradually implement a completely smoke free policy.

For more information on developing a smoke free policy in community services see resources and training.

Education and Activities

Provide staff with opportunities to improve their knowledge and confidence in supporting people to quit by encouraging them to complete smoking cessation support training. Some staff may have the skills to offer more comprehensive support to clients by providing in-house counselling to smokers. Encourage them to develop their skills and set up an internal referral pathway to their service.

To improve the sustainability of your organisation’s efforts for providing quit smoking support you could:

• Include quit smoking support training in professional development processes
• Include training on smoking cessation in the induction process for new staff

The new strategy you implement may be just the motivation that staff need to cut down or to stop smoking; therefore it is important that staff are encouraged to quit and are provided with adequate support. See: Help staff to quit

Systems and Processes

Whether staff have contact with clients or not, it is important to ensure all staff understand the value of providing quit smoking support. To make the provision of smoking support part of regular routine you may need to make changes to existing systems and processes that highlight everyone’s role in supporting clients to quit and encourage staff to talk to people about their smoking. Your organisation could:

• Include prompts to remind staff to ask clients about smoking in client intake and casework
• Include the provision of smoking support in employee job descriptions
• Implement performance management processes that acknowledge and reward the work that staff do to address smoking
• Include smoking-related outcomes in your organisation’s reporting process

Monitor

Implementing systems that monitor client smoking status, attempts to quit, and the level of quit smoking support given, will help you assess the success of the strategies that you have put in place in assisting people to quit or cut down their smoking. This information can feedback into your approach so you can continually change and improve, tailoring smoking cessation support to both the individual and specific client group.

Including smoking-related outcomes in your organisation’s reporting processes not only publicly demonstrates your commitment to improving health and financial equality for your client group, but will ensure that your organisation continues to prioritise quit smoking support in the long-term.

Repeat

As you learn more you can constantly update your program to better support staff and clients to quit or cut down their smoking.