Helping Youth Smokers Stop Smoking Through the Youth Quitline Programme

In Hong Kong, the demand of smoking cessation service of Youth was increasing in the past 10 years, the first youth-oriented smoking cessation hotline "Youth Quitline" was established in 2005. From August 2005 to July 2016, "Youth Quitline" has received over 9,267 telephone inquiries and provided telephone smoking cessation counselling for 1,952 youth smokers.

Youth smokers are recruited using the reactive and proactive strategies. The operation hours of Quitline service are weekdays from 17:00 to 21:00 and on weekends from 14:00 to 20:00. A questionnaire asking the smoking status, reason of smoking, dependency level, knowledge, attitude and practice of smoking or quitting at baseline, the perceived barriers of the smokers and the use of other tobacco products were designed to assess the status of participants, brief counselling with the use of motivational intervention approach is delivered during the phone call.

Telephone counseling at 1-week, 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, 9-month, 12-month and follow-up at 24-month are conducted with the participants to assess their smoking status (by questionnaire) and reinforce intervention (encourage quitting and providing quitting tips). Self-reported quitters who have quitted smoking for at least 7 days at 6-month are invited to perform saliva cotinine test (using NicAlert strip) plus exhaled carbon monoxide text to validate the smoking status.

A qualitative interview will be conducted to investigate the use of other tobacco products of the Youth Quitline participants, and aimed to find out their smoking patterns and feelings of using these products, and how these products might affect quitting or smoking, and how the protest activates influence the smoking behaviors among the youth smokers.