Overview of Cardiovascular Prevention: Smoking Cessation

Ireland: “Ireland’s QUIT Smoking Services”

By Siobhan Jennings, National CVD Prevention Coordinator for Ireland (2018)

Aim

This campaign aims to empower, enable and support smokers to quit smoking by providing behavioural support, advice and motivation to quit using an evidence-based client centred approach.

It is part of an ambitious plan to reach the Tobacco Free Ireland target of less than 5% smoking by 2025. 

Target Group

Smokers

Method

This integrated smoking cessation campaign consists of multiple services, including:

• A social marketing campaign to encourage smokers to make a quit attempt and to raise awareness of the free supports available from the QUIT Smoking Cessation Service.
• A new interactive website complete with online QUITplan and a new QUIT Team support service was launched in 2015 and offers support over the phone, email, live web-chat and via social media.
• A smoking cessation treatment programme comprising of 7 contacts over 12 months.

Typically, clients are offered weekly support for the first four weeks of their quit attempt and follow-up at three and twelve months. Services are available free of charge through a variety of channels including specialist one to one support and group support, complementing the above-mentioned phone line and website.

A series of new TV and radio ads that celebrate this growing number of quitters with positive early indication of engagement on social media, increased numbers phoning the QUIT Team and increased QUITplan sign ups.

Main results

Since the Quit campaign began in 2011, the numbers of smokers in Ireland has dropped by over 125,000. This decline means that there are now more quitters than current smokers.

12,081 clients received smoking cessation support through the QUIT Smoking cessation support services in 2015 increasing to 14,475 in 2016 (19.6% increase). Half of clients (50%) who received QUIT smoking cessation services in 2016 were quit at 4 weeks.

More information

Visit this website.

Read the "Country of the Month" report from Ireland to get more detailed information about CVD Prevention in this country.  

Note: The content of this article reflects the personal opinion of the author/s and is not necessarily the official position of the European Society of Cardiology.