[Telephone counseling for tobacco cessation].

Interventions with the objective of guiding and facilitating smoking cessation are important strategies, as well as necessary for planning health promotion programs. This article proposes a new approach for smoking cessation: a telephone approach. This study was conducted at the Health Promotion Center of the Hospital de Clínicas, School of Medicine of the University of São Paulo (HCFMUSP), Brazil. Eighteen patients were called five times receiving counseling and interventions based on the Cognitive Behavioral Theory McNemar and Kappa tests were used for the statistical analysis. According to the results, patients who received five phone calls reduced their cigarette intake and 16.7% of them quit smoking, suggesting that this method can become an alternative in the treatment to quit smoking.