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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Wednesday, 30 June 2004) . . Page.. 3083 ..

it is something that makes them feel a bit better. That is reasonable and a justifiable decision for people to make. These conversations about substance abuse, including tobacco, have to be situated in the social context. We have to understand those social influences as well in any discussion about this.

I will repeat, because it is relevant to this particular debate, my concern about what is happening in supermarkets at the moment with cigarettes. They are very obvious when you go to the checkout, and I remember that that was not supposed to happen.

MS MacDONALD (5.40): Mr Speaker, I will attempt to be brief. In the ACT the quit service is provided by the Cancer Council ACT, with funding from ACT Health and other sources. The Cancer Council ACT is also piloting a staff training information session at the Canberra Hospital with a focus on the antenatal and cardiac wards. Ten patient information sessions are planned for the next 12 months, along with two eight-week quit courses for patients. This is at no cost to the patient.

The ACT government has provided $75,000 to the Cancer Council ACT for support of Quitline. These funds will be used to promote increased awareness and use of Quitline and to provide additional staffing to ensure that Quitline calls are answered. Providing intensive, one-to-one counselling is not an efficient, or indeed effective, way of addressing the issue of smoking for patients in a hospital setting for a number of reasons.

One reason is that most patients attend as day only patients so are not in an ideal position, for reasons of time, to receive any long-term benefit from counselling. Another reason is the associated cost of this type of approach. It is quite intensive and would require the resources of many individual counsellors, which would be far beyond the resources of any service provider.

The current approach of the Cancer Council ACT—providing hospital staff training, group session work and brief intervention—provides an opportunity to develop an effective, efficient and comprehensive hospital based anti-smoking strategy based on the principles of best practice. I would add that it is my understanding that in the ACT we also provide quit smoking counselling free of charge to anybody who wants it, not just people going into hospital, which is the thing we ought to be doing. In hospital you might be in a captive situation, but that is usually on a short-term basis. We want to get to people before they get into hospitals, rather than once they are in there, to try and get them off the nicotine in the first place.

As you are aware, Mr Speaker, I am not averse to looking at any means of trying to get people off tobacco. We all know the associated risks; I, and many people in this place, have spoken about them before. Indeed, I would consider that I have conducted a little bit of a campaign on this issue—not for quite as long as you have, Mr Speaker. I am definitely devoted to getting people off tobacco and nicotine for their own health’s sake.

There was an issue of nicotine replacement therapy. It is my understanding that in New South Wales there has been no evaluation of the trial of nicotine replacement therapy. They have just started doing nicotine replacement therapy in New South Wales, and the results of that evaluation will not be known for nine or 10 months. It would be a better idea for us to wait and see the evaluation of nicotine replacement therapy—whether it

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