Promoting Smoking Cessation in the Community Via QTW 2015

Although smoking prevalence is decreasing in Hong Kong, there are still 648,800 daily smokers 10.8% (Census and Statistics Department, 2013) and half will be killed by smoking (Lam, 2012) which accounts for over 7,000 deaths per year (Lam, Ho, Hedley, Mak, & Peto, 2001). Smoking also accounts for a large amount of medical cost, long-term care and productivity loss of US$688 million (0.6% Hong Kong GDP) (Census & Statistics Department, 2001; McGhee et al., 2006) . Smoking is a highly addictive behavior and it is difficult for smokers with strong nicotine dependence to quit without assistance. On the other hand, reaching and helping the many smokers who have no intention to quit is a challenge, because they are unlikely to seek professional help from smoking cessation services.

The Quit and Win programme provides an opportunity to reach and encourage a large group of smokers to make quit attempt and maintain abstinence. The Quit and Win model posits that smokers participating in the contest will have higher motivation to quit with incentives and better social support (Cahill & Perera, 2011). Studies have found that such quitting contests or incentive programs appeared to reach a large number of smokers and demonstrated a significantly higher quit rate for the quit and win group than for the control group (Cahill & Perera, 2008).

Smoking cessation services in Hong Kong are under-used with more than half (60.9%) adult daily smokers who had never used smoking cessation services (Census and Statistics Department, 2013). Among these smokers only 9.6% were willing to use the services. Existing services mostly require self-initiation to seek the services but smokers general lack the will power of initiation. Active referral will help overcome the barriers of self-initiation. There is preliminary evidence that active referral of smokers to smoking cessation hotline services may increase likelihood of smoking abstinence at 12-month follow-up compared with no active referrals (Borland et al., 2008). A recent study has also reported that individuals who used the community-based referral were also more likely to quit than those who did not (43.6% vs 15.3%, P<0.001) (Haas et al., 2015).

Therefore, the present study will examine (1) effectiveness of the active referral and AWARD approaches, (2) explore the use of CBPR model to build capacity and to engage community partners in taking on this important public health issue for sustainability in the community. In addition, process evaluation will be conducted to assess the effectiveness of the recruitment activity and how it is linked with the overall program outcomes.