Charity Gets Smokers To Quit By Messaging Them

A Hong Kong charitable organisation says it has been helping people to quit smoking by giving them encouragement via instant messaging.

Lok Sin Tong said on Thursday that it had sent out Whatsapp messages to 300 participants in its smoking cessation programme, and more than 20 percent of them successfully kicked the habit after one year.

For those who actually started interacting with counsellors via text messages, the success rate was even higher, at 43 percent.

An assistant nursing professor of the University of Hong Kong, Kelvin Wang, said the programme involved what he called “regular messages” – which included information about the harm of smoking, the benefits of quitting, as well as details of other smoking cessation services.

If participants responded to the messages, Wang said counsellors would then try to learn more about their backgrounds, such as why they found it so hard to quit, or what kind of work they did – in order to tailor-make advice for them.

For example, Wang said, most participants who had difficulty in quitting were found to work in the construction industry. He said a lot of their peers were smokers as well, and they treated smoking as a way to “take a break” and to relieve stress.

Instant messaging, in such cases, was more effective than counselling in person, he said, because it was easier to reach the smokers via the phone.

But Wang said, most importantly, counsellors were able to show that they cared about the participants.

“They can show their empathy or their caring for this smoker. And this, we find, is quite important,” he told RTHK’s Wendy Wong.

“Particularly, if some smokers feel they are being cared about, they are more likely to follow the smoking cessation advice,” he said.