Cooperation by health services can help people to give up smoking: NZ expert

Assoc Prof Chris Bullen, director of the National Institute for Health Innovation at Auckland University, said that the Quitline to help people kick the habit in his country managed to reduce the number of smokers by 30 per cent over 10 years.

Bullen said the service aimed to make New Zealand a smoke-free country by 2025.

He said the key contribution to the Quitline’s success was every sector in society collaborating in the initiative.

Bullen spoke at the Asean Regional Workshop on Sustainable Funding for Tobacco Control, held in Bangkok on Friday. It was organised by the Thai Health Foundation Promotion and the Southeast Asian Tobacco Control Alliance.

Bullen said the Quitline was working closely with universities and hospitals that provide research and evidence about smoking to help create innovative methods or ideas to help smokers give up cigarettes. 

Policy-makers also supported the programme by funding the research, increasing cigarette prices and introducing anti-smoking legislation.

“Smoking is an issue for the whole of society,” he said. “We need everybody working together. 

“The government makes the policies based on evidence provided by the researchers, who work closely with service providers to understand the real environment of the issue. 

“Other sectors like education and social welfare are also important. Everybody has a role to play. And to make progress, we have to work in a cooperative way.”

Bullen said that smoking impacted on society as a whole because, among other things, if a lot of people smoke it encourages others to follow suit.

He said the Quitline helped smokers quit by providing both medical and behavioural support, while the government also needed to make it harder for people to smoke by raising cigarette prices and introducing anti-smoking legislation. 

Besides a telephone-based counselling service, Quitline also boasts SMS support, a group-based cessation service and other online services such as a calculator that shows how much money smokers can save by quitting smoking. 

Bullen said anti-smoking campaigns would also reduce government health expenses in the future and create more employees. 

There were 13 million smokers in Thailand, half of whom are expected to die prematurely from smoking-related diseases.

Another speaker at the event, Thailand National Quitline president Assoc Prof Jintana Yunibhand, said the Kingdom’s phone-based Quitline had been effective but the body still needed to work more on reaching out to people as not many people knew about the service or had access to it.