Building Capacity and Promoting Smoking Cessation in the Community Via Quit to Win Contest 2014: a Randomized Controlled Trial

Although smoking prevalence is decreasing in Hong Kong, there are still 645,000 daily smokers 10.7% ( Thematic Household Survey 2012) 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) (McGhee et al., 2006) (Census & Statistics Department (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government), 2001). 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 & Petera, 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 & Rafael, 2008).

The Quit to Win Contest in 2014 and the study's interventions using cut down to quit approach are theoretically based on the Health Action Process Approach ( HAPA) for the intervention group (Schwarzer, 2008). The HAPA suggests that one's intention of behavior change can be fostered by knowing that the new behavior has positive outcomes as opposed to the negative outcomes that accompany the current behavior; and planning (action planning and coping planning) which serves as an operative mediator between intentions and behavior. Using gradual cut down approach on smoking cessation will probably increase smoker's self-efficacy on smoking cessation as the process could be achieved at the smoker's own perceived pace without placing too much pressure on themselves but with greater control of self in the cessation process. This was supported by the evidence that smoking reduction approach led to a greater self-efficacy to resist smoking and increased subsequent quitting (Broms, Korhonen, & Kaprio, 2008). Most importantly, reducing cigarette consumption will lower the nicotine dependence which is associated with later abstinence (Hughes et al., 2004). On the other hand, quitting immediately will have a less sense of control and may be subjected to relapse thus lower the self-efficacy on quitting.

Therefore, the present study will examine (1) effectiveness of the cut down to quit (CDTQ) and quit immediately (QI) approaches; (2) explore the use of 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. 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.