“Quit To Win Contest” to promote smoking cessation: a randomized control trial on the effectiveness of brief and behavioral interventions

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND AIM: The “Quit and Win” program has been organized all over the world to use monetary incentives to motivate smokers to quit. Few previous programmes had tested the effectiveness of additional interventions in helping the participants. METHODS: A 3-arm cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of face-to-face brief counselling (Intervention group: n=265) and Short Message Service (SMS group: n=419), compared with no counselling and SMS (Control group: n=432), to motivate participants of the Hong Kong Quit-to-Win Contest to quit. The “Counselling group” had a brief on-site and two telephone counselling sessions, while the “SMS group” received 16 motivational messages in 4 weeks after joining the Contest. All participants received a self-help smoking cessation booklet and were followed up at 3 and 6 months. RESULTS: The self-reported 7-day point prevalence quit rates at 6 months for the three RCT groups were 10.6%, 6.7%, and 11.3%, respectively. The rates of smoking reduction by 50% or more were 29.8%, 23.6%, and 26.6%, respectively. There were no significant differences in the two outcomes between any of the groups. No significant changes in the perceived importance, difficulty, and confidence of quitting were detected in the three groups. CONCLUSIONS: We found no evidence to support that brief behavioral interventions could boost up the quit rates or improve the perceptions of quitting among participants who joined the Quit and Win programme. Future studies on additional interventions for the Quit and Win programme should consider other non-behavioral or more intensive interventions to increase quitting.