Promoting Smoking Cessation in the Community Via Quit to Win Contest 2013

Summary

According to the Census \& Statistics Department (2011), there are still 659,300 daily smokers (11.1%) in Hong Kong. Smoking and passive smoking kill over 7,000 people per year. Smoking is addictive, and it is difficult for some motivated smokers to quit without assistance. On the other hand, many smokers may not be ready to quit or want to quit on their own, so it is difficult to reach them.

Quit and Win programme is an opportunity to reach and encourage a large group of smokers to make quit attempt. Quit and Win Contest assumes that smokers can develop a higher motivation to quit and gain a wider social support in quitting. According to Cahill and Petera (2011), smokers can develop a high motivation to quit and gain a wider social support through participating in the Quit and Win Contest.

The Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health (COSH) organized three "Quit to Win Contests" and recruited over 3000 smokers from 2009-2012. These events enhanced the motivation and confidence to quit smoking. Lucky draw was also conducted to attract smokers to quit smoking and winners were validated by biochemical tests.

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is an partnership approach that can enlighten and utilize the network within communities as community partners can obtain ample manpower and social resources. To effectively raise the awareness of the contest and recruit as many participants as we can from the community, working with NGOs in the 18 Hong Kong districts with a CBPR model may be one effective way of program implementation.

Thus, we proposed to (1) test the effectiveness of combining competition and short-term monetary incentives to motivate smokers who participate in the Quit to Win Contest 2013 to quit smoking; (2) use a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model to build capacity and to engage community partners in taking on this important public health issue for sustainability in the community; and (3) conduct the process evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the recruitment activity and how it is linked with the overall program outcomes.

Hypothesis:

To examine the effectiveness of the interventions, three arms are (i) Group A: Informed early monetary incentive, which participants will be notified of the incentive through telephone follow-up at 1-week and 1-month follow-ups; (ii) Group B: Uninformed early monetary incentive, which participants will not be informed about the incentive until 3-month telephone follow-up; (iii) Group C (control group): Uninformed late monetary incentive, which participants will not be informed about the incentive throughout 1-week, 1-month and 3-month follow-ups.

The primary outcomes are the self-reported 7-day point prevalence (pp) quit rate at 3 months of group A compared to group B and group C. The secondary outcomes include (i) self-reported 7-day point prevalence (pp) quit rate at 6 months, (ii) biochemical validated quit rates, (iii) rate of smoking reduction by at least half of baseline amount, (iv) number of quit attempts at 3 and 6 months among the three groups and (v) the above cessation outcomes of all subjects, including or not including in the RCT.

Conditions

• Smoking Cessation

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Informed early monetary incentive

Participants will be informed at 1 week after the baseline recruitment about the monetary incentive of quitting. Apart from the different arrangement of monetary incentives for the three RCT arms, all participants of the Quit to Win Contest will receive self-help materials on smoking cessation, including a COSH-developed self-help smoking cessation booklet, a health education card, and the quitline (i.e. 1833183). The theory-based health education card (pocket size), which guided by the HAPA, will be developed and distributed to the participants as a reminder and a 'homework assignment' to be completed at home, for the purpose of enhancing their intention and practice of the suggested behaviour (quitting smoking).

BEHAVIORAL

Uninformed early monetary incentive

Participants will be informed at 3 months after the baseline recruitment about the monetary incentive of quitting. Apart from the different arrangement of monetary incentives for the three RCT arms, all participants of the Quit to Win Contest will receive self-help materials on smoking cessation, including a COSH-developed self-help smoking cessation booklet, a health education card, and the quitline (i.e. 1833183). The theory-based health education card (pocket size), which guided by the HAPA, will be developed and distributed to the participants as a reminder and a 'homework assignment' to be completed at home, for the purpose of enhancing their intention and practice of the suggested behaviour (quitting smoking).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• The University of Hong Kong

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• William Li, PhD · The University of Hong Kong

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2013-06-30

Primary Completion

2013-09-30

Completion

2014-06-30

Countries

• China