Community Smoking-Cessation Programs Help More Smokers Quit

An intervention including brief advice and active referral can help reduce smoking rates in communities where smoking cessation services are underused, according to a recent study.

The majority of existing smoking cessation clinics are costly, passive, and underused. To explore the effect of a combined intervention involving brief, model-guided smoking cessation advice plus active referral to smoking cessation services, the researchers assessed 1226 adult daily smokers (mean age, 42 years) from June 20, 2015, to September 24, 2015. All participants in the study had been part of the Quit-to-Win Contest in Hong Kong in 2015.
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Participants were randomly assigned to active referral (n = 402), brief advice (n = 416), or control (n = 408) groups. The active referral and brief advice groups were offered brief telephone counseling at months 1 and 2, and interventions were performed by trained smoking cessation ambassadors.

The primary outcome was defined as the self-reported past 7-day point prevalence of abstinence (PPA) at 6 months. Secondary outcomes included carbon monoxide level-validated abstinence, a reduction in smoking, and use of smoking cessation services.

Results of the study indicated that the response rate had been 68.2% at month 3 and 72.3% at month 6. In the active referral group, PPAs were 18.9% at month 3 and 17.2% at month 6, compared with 8.9% at month 3 and 9.4% at month 6 in the brief advice group, and 14.0% at month 3 and 11.5% at month 6 in the control group.

The active referral group had significantly higher validated abstinence rates at month 3 and month 6 compared with the brief advice and control groups. In addition, more participants in the active referral group (25.1%) had used smoking cessation services than those in the brief advice (2.4%) or control (3.4%) groups at month 6.

“An intervention involving brief advice and active referral delivered to smokers in the community by volunteers can increase quitting in places where [smoking cessation] services are available but underused,” the researchers concluded.

—Christina Vogt

Reference:

Wang MP, Suen YN, Li WHC, et al. Intervention with brief cessation advice plus active referral for proactively recruited community smokers: a pragmatic cluster randomized clinical trial. JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(12):1790-1797. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.5793.