Brief Tobacco Cessation Intervention

Summary

Traditional smoking cessation clinics and telephone quitlines are expensive and 'passive' as they require motivated smokers to visit the clinic or make a phone call to seek help. However, in most middle-resource countries, smoking cessation clinics are not well publicized. Most health care professionals (HCP) are not active in performing smoking cessation counselling to their patients. They are not aware of the available smoking cessation services or the benefits of such services and hence do not refer smokers to smoking cessation services. On the other hand, physicians play a critical role in reducing tobacco use by advising smoking patients to quit (Richmond, 1999). Physician's advice to quit smoking not only motivates smokers to quit but also increases their quitting confidence (Fiore et al., 2000; Ossip-Klein et al., 2000).

Brief smoking cessation interventions have been shown to be effective with strong evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), however, it is no evidence to show that longer interventions are more effective than shorter interventions. If carried out in routine clinical practice by all physicians and other HCP, brief interventions can potentially benefit a great number of smokers and increase smoking cessation rate. Therefore, we propose to examine the effect of a brief smoking cessation counselling intervention (10-20 seconds AWARD model) among patients using a randomized controlled trail (RCT) design in Guangdong province, China

This project aims to evaluate the effect of physicians' brief smoking cessation intervention (AWARD model) in real busy clinic settings using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design.

Conditions

• Smoking

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

The brief smoking cessation AWARD model

* Ask whether or not the patient currently smokes * Warn the patients that at least one out of two smokers will be killed by smoking. Recent research shows that two out of three smokers will be killed by smoking. The 10-20-second script could be like 'I warn you that smoking can kill you by many serious diseases and that your chance to be killed prematurely by smoking is about 50% to 67%. * Advice the patients to quit now or as soon as possible because quitting can reduce the excess risks substantially. * Refer the patients to a smoking cessation clinic or call telephone quitlines (if available) as soon as possible, emphasizing that smoking cessation counsellors are caring and helpful. * Do it again: Repeat the intervention among smokers who fail to quit or relapse, and encourage them to try to quit again.

BEHAVIORAL

Placebo intervention

Advice the smokers to eat vegetables, and engage in regular physical activities, and offer the smokers a card which contains information about the benefits of eating vegetables and a pictorial information leaflet which shows the recommended amount of vegetables and fruits an adult should eat a day

Sponsors & Collaborators

• The University of Hong Kong

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Tai hing Lam, MD · The University of Hong Kong

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2014-08-31

Primary Completion

2017-10-31

Completion

2017-12-31

Countries

• China