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This paper's aim is to provide an overview of how to respond to alcohol use/abuse and intimate partner violence for men and women attending primary care.

The paper describes the role of family practitioners in identifying patients in primary care who have dual problems of substance use and intimate partner violence.

Primary care is a potential site of early intervention using brief counselling techniques for male perpetrators and female victims of intimate partner violence who also have hazardous or harmful drinking.

Practitioners should be aware of the overlap between these two social public health problems and how to respond.

Practitioners often do not identify the hidden issue of intimate partner violence.

People with a history of depression are more likely to smoke and less likely to achieve abstinence from smoking long term. The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors associated with smoking and smoking cessation among patients with depression.

This paper reports on smoking prevalence and cessation in a cohort of 789 primary care attendees with depressive symptoms (Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale score of=16) recruited from 30 randomly selected Primary Care Practices in Victoria, Australia in 2005.

At baseline, 32 per cent of participants smoked. Smokers were more likely to be male, unmarried, receive government benefits, have difficulty managing on available income, have emphysema, a chronic illness, poor self-rated health, to have more severe depressive and anxiety symptoms, to be taking anti-depressants, to be hazardous drinkers, to report suicidal ideation and to have experienced childhood physical or sexual abuse. At 12 months, 20 participants reported quitting. Females and people with good or better self-rated health were significantly more likely to have quit, while people with a chronic illness or suicidal ideation were less likely to quit. Smoking cessation was not associated with increases in depression or anxiety symptoms. Only six participants remained quit over four years.

Rates of smoking were high, and long-term cessation was low among primary care patients with depressive symptoms. Primary care physicians should provide additional monitoring and support to assist smokers with depression quit and remain quit.

This is the first naturalistic study of smoking patterns among primary care attendees with depressive symptoms.