Background and aims: 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 are a large number of clinical stop-smoking services around the world. These could be connected into a global network to provide data to assess what treatment components are most effective, for what populations, in what settings. To enable this, a minimum data set (MDS) is required to standardise the data captured from smoking cessation services globally.Methods: We describe some of the key steps involved in developing a global MDS for smoking cessation services, and methodologies to be considered for implementation of these, including approaches for reaching consensus on data items to include in a MDS, and for robust validation of a MDS. We use informal approximations of these methods to produce an example global MDS for smoking cessation. Our aim with this is to stimulate further discussions around the development a global MDS for smoking cessation services.Results: Our example MDS comprises three sections. The first is a set of data items characterising 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.Conclusions: There is a clear requirement for a MDS to standardise 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.
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