The cost effectiveness of an education outreach representative to OB practitioners to promote smoking cessation counseling.

Growing concern about mothers, smoking during pregnancy calls for effective patient education by health care professionals. Because most women receive prenatal care and people with high perceived self-risk do have high cessation rates when advised by physicians, prenatal care in private practice offers a unique opportunity to decrease the number of pregnant women who smoke. The pilot test described here is a one-group pretest and posttest community trial which tested the feasibility of using an education outreach representative to market smoking- and pregnancy-education materials to private practice physicians. The costs of the pilot test are compared to the costs of three other strategies for disseminating education materials. The pilot test proved more cost-effective than two direct-mail strategies and one commercial enterprise. These results suggest that this strategy is feasible and merits further study for distributing education materials and teaching effective education strategies to physicians.