Sue Flocke, Ph.D. spent most of her career focused on cancer prevention and screening within the primary care setting. She joined OHSU Department of Family Medicine in 2018 and prior to that was at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio where she received her PhD in health services research and was a faculty member in the Department of Family Medicine for 21 years. The last 10 years or so of research has been focused on reducing the harm from tobacco. Her research is typically done from the lens of family medicine or primary care settings to the intersection of primary care and public health and typically includes both quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Dr. Flocke is currently working on a study called Choose2Quit where she compares the effect of a referral to a tobacco cessation navigator who talks about choices for cessation counseling, medications and other cessation supports vs. a referral to the state quit line. She is collaborating with a team to adapt some of the tobacco assessment and assistance approaches that we’ve developed to the setting of food pantries. She’s also collaborating on some other tobacco related projects with family medicine researcher, Dr. Steffani Bailey, which are conducted with Oregon primary care practices.

When asked what she’s most proud of at this point in her career, Dr. Flocke shared that she’s proud to work with a health care system to develop and implement a team-based process for using a brief ask-aise0connect strategy for tobacco cessation. She shared that the team approached this project with a focus on sustainability. That approach was wildly successful and sustained at high levels several years after implementation. This built on important work in 2016, leading to them being the first in Ohio to implement an electronic referral to the state Quitline and just the 16^th state in the country to have this capacity. The team is still building on that initial effort and working to expand its impact.

According to Dr. Flocke, what she values the most about being a part of the OHSU Department of Family Medicine is that both within the research group and across the department, members are incredibly collaborative and supportive. She said that “The collective wisdom across a range of research initiatives and the willingness to talk about and help advance half-baked ideas is both amazing and humbling.”

Regarding what is next, there has been important progress to reduce tobacco use – particularly the use of cigarettes in the United States. Public health policy and work to hold tobacco companies accountable for the mortality and morbidity caused by use of their products have been major driving forces. In the next 5-10 years, Dr. Flocke hopes that the policy and accountability work is applied to other tobacco products, particularly flavored products (e.g. cigarillos and vapes) that are highly attractive to children and adolescents. She anticipates that current research will inform effective team-based strategies and will identify more options for medications for primary care practices to use to support people who want to quit tobacco.