State facilities will help people quit smoking

The Ministry of Health plans to create over 30 assistance centers for people willing to quit smoking before 2012, UNIAN reports, based on comments made by Alla Hry­ho­ren­ko, deputy director of the State Sanitary and Epi­de­miological De­part­ment of the Mi­nistry of Health. “We plan to launch the sites in every regional center and in each large city,” she noted. According to her, the centers will be based on drug dis­pen­sa­ries and social health centers. “The state anti-smoking outreach program provides funds for the crea­tion of such centers… According to our cal­cu­la­tions, this will cost ap­pro­xi­ma­tely 1.5 million hryvnias,” she infor­med. According to Hry­ho­ren­ko, it is necessary to equip the centers and also train the staff that will help people eager to quit smoking. She noted that there are such centers in Kyiv, Lutsk, Cherkasy, and Donetsk already. These centers are created within the fra­mework of the state welfare prog­ram on addressing the harmful in­fluen­ce of tobacco on people’s health until 2012. Let us remind that the Kyiv International Institute of So­cio­lo­gy carried out the survey within the framework of the Ministry of Health and World Health Organization research, in which 68 percent of current smokers surveyed stated that they were interested in quitting smoking.