Smoking cessation quitlines: An underrecognized intervention success story.

Abstract

Quitlines providing telephone counseling for smoking cessation derive from behavioral research and theory, have been shown to be effective, and have been adopted and then institutionalized at both the state and national levels. Although psychologists have made seminal contributions to quitline development and evaluation, this accomplishment has gone largely unnoticed by the practice and research communities in clinical, counseling, and health psychology. This article summarizes the development, content, structure, empirical status, and current reach of cessation quitlines. We note the rich research opportunities afforded by quitlines, describe some recent approaches to improving their effectiveness, and suggest that an understanding of how quitlines work could also improve their effectiveness. The implications for practitioners and the potential application of telephone counseling to other disorders are also considered.

Rebooting Psychotherapy Research and Practice to Reduce the Burden of Mental Illness

“…Tobacco users who call a quitline receive an empirically validated, standardized, and manualized intervention incorporating various services such as materials by mail, prerecorded messages, real-time phone counseling or a return phone call from a counselor, access to quitting medication, or some combination thereof (Lichtenstein, Zhu, & Tedeschi, 2010). Quitlines have demonstrated tremendous reach, as they are currently offered in all 50 states and Washington, DC and have also been adopted and sponsored at the national level of various countries in Europe, Oceania, Asia, and South and North America.…”

Impact of Canadian tobacco packaging policy on use of a toll-free quit-smoking line: an interrupted time-series analysis

“…12 Quitlines can be easily accessed free of charge, have no eligibility restrictions and provide evidence-based information, advice and motivational counselling to callers. 13 The volume of calls has frequently been used as an indicator of interest in quitting in response to population-based smoking cessation policies, such as health warning labels with a toll-free quitline number. 10,14,15 We used data from the Ontario provincial quitline to investigate whether there were changes in call volumes, the number of new callers receiving treatment and the characteristics of new callers in the months leading up to, and after, the introduction of Health Canada's new policy of having health warning labels include the toll-free quitline number.…”

Contextual analysis and the success of translational research

“…However, few of these were ever widely disseminated. Rather, a network of federal research and public health organizations, along with numerous advocacy organizations such as Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, Action on Smoking and Health, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society, cooperated to advocate for changes in policies and to motivate individual smokers to quit (done mostly with no assistance from any formal program [20]). This is not to say that research was irrelevant to the progress of the tobacco control movement.…”