The ABC approach comes from The Union guide Smoking Cessation and Smokefree Environments for Tuberculosis Patients. BRAC's intervention is as follows: health care workers ask registered TB patients if they smoke and record their smoking status. Patients then receive 5-10 minutes of 'brief advice' to quit smoking to improve their health and the results of their TB treatment. The advice includes personalised and general information about the harms of tobacco smoking. At subsequent visits by the community health volunteers for DOT and to the DOTS centre for follow-up examinations , they are provided with 5-10 minutes of cessation support to help them quit smoking (or to continue not smoking). This includes support for how to make their homes smoke-free and avoid secondhand smoke.
Between 8 May 2011 and 31 March 2012, a total 1,710 new sputum-smear positive TB patients were diagnosed in the 17 participating centres, of whom 26% (438) were current smokers. Cohort results of the 239 TB patients who registered for smoking cessation between May and August 2011 show that 80% of them had successfully quit smoking at the end of their six-month TB treatment. This demonstrates that brief advice and cessation support given by DOT providers at each visit can result in a remarkable quit rate among TB patients.