Brief Tobacco Cessation Intervention

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.