141st APHA Annual Meeting

In This section

280832
Mondays: Helping smokers quit and stay quit

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Rachelle Reeder, MPH , The Monday Campaigns, The Monday Campaigns, New York, NY
Morgan Johnson, MPH , The Monday Campaigns, New York, NY
The majority of tobacco quitters attempt to quit an average of 8-11 times before they are successful. Insight into behavioral patterns may be valuable for determining how to optimally time interventions to help quitters sustain tobacco cessation. Smoking cessation programs can help their participants prevent relapsing by periodically disseminating messages to keep them engaged with the program and focused on their quit. Practitioners could increase receptivity by answering the following questions: 1) How often should we send communications to program participants? and 2) When is the ideal window of time to deliver these messages? New evidence shows consistent weekly cycles in calls to tobacco quit lines, with the largest volume of calls occurring on Mondays. Studying these cycles may help us improve how tobacco cessation programs communicate with group members, allocate quit line resources, and promote their services. Using this evidence, the Monday Campaigns created “Quit & Stay Quit Monday” a smoking cessation campaign that encourages quitters to use Monday as the day to recommit to their tobacco cessation. This gives them 52 chances a year to quit, celebrate progress, or quit again. The Monday Campaigns piloted “Quit & Stay Quit Monday” with several smoking cessation groups across the country and measured how leveraging Mondays helped programs engage participants and helped participants sustain their tobacco cessation. This presentation will provide insight into the Quit & Stay Quit Monday strategy and walk them through the evidence for harnessing weekly patterns to effectively communicate with people trying to quit smoking.

Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Communication and informatics
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Social and behavioral sciences

Learning Objectives:
Explain how identifying recurring patterns in quit like usage provides critical information for timing tobacco cessation communications Describe the Quit & Stay Quit Monday campaign and its successes for helping sustain tobacco cessation Discuss ways in which program developers and researchers can leverage the Monday concept to improve outcomes with their own tobacco cessation programs.

Keywords: Tobacco, Communication

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have been involved in the campaign implementation, pilot recruitment, and program evaluation and can speak about it in detail. I have my Masters in Public Health and a background in social marketing and health communications.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.