ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the daily operations of an inpatient tobacco cessation program that uses a centralized counselor approach. It includes examples of tracking logs and organizing tools, and suggests what bigger picture administrative tasks to do throughout the year. This chapter assumes that all the preliminary and developmental work of implementation has been completed—the program has a physical, departmental, and financial home within the hospital, policies and procedures have been checked, protocols and systems have been designed, the hospital infrastructure is set up including the tobacco use question on admitting forms and a column for tobacco status on the daily census, access to patients’ charts has been approved, patient charting requirements are documented, funding is in place, counselors have been hired and trained, departments have received in-service training, a database program has been designed, data collection instruments have been incorporated into the database program, all purchases have been made, the intervention has been developed, the program director, champions, and advisory committee are in place, stakeholders and their needs have been identified and incorporated into the implementation and maintenance plan, community resources have been capitalized on, and reporting systems have been set up.
