Evaluating clinical stop-smoking services globally: towards a minimum data set

Behavioural and pharmacological support for smoking cessation improves the chances of success and represents a highly cost-effective way of preventing chronic disease and premature death. There is a large number of clinical stop-smoking services throughout the world. These could be connected into a global network to provide data to assess what treatment components are most effective, for what populations and in what settings. To enable this, a minimum data set (MDS) is required to standardize the data captured from smoking cessation services globally.

We describe some of the key steps involved in developing a global MDS for smoking cessation services and methodologies to be considered for their implementation, including approaches for reaching consensus on data items to include in a MDS and for its robust validation. We use informal approximations of these methods to produce an example global MDS for smoking cessation. Our aim with this is to stimulate further discussion around the development of a global MDS for smoking cessation services.

Our example MDS comprises three sections. The first is a set of data items characterizing treatments offered by a service. The second is a small core set of data items describing clients' characteristics, engagement with the service and outcomes. The third is an extended set of client data items to be captured in addition to the core data items wherever resources permit.

There would be benefit in establishing a minimum data set (MDS) to standardize data captured for smoking cessation services globally. Once implemented, a formal MDS could provide a basis for meaningful evaluations of different smoking cessation treatments in different populations in a variety of settings across many countries.