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Telephone counselling: behavioural support or not?
Christopher Anderson, Program Director, California Smokers’ Helpline,
Moores Cancer Center, University of California, USA
Abstract
Telephone counselling for tobacco cessation has become popular throughout the developed world. Each constituency has a good reason to like it: smokers because it is so accessible; social marketers because it’s easy to promote and puts a positive spin on anti-tobacco campaigns; health care providers because it gives them something to say to their patients who smoke: ‘Just call this number and they’ll help you quit’; and public health officials because it’s cost-effective. Multiple clinical trials have established that proactive telephone counselling can significantly improve outcomes, and the cost of intervention is less than the eventual cost of doing nothing. For these reasons, telephone counselling has spread across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and is starting to appear as well in Asia and South America.
Proactive telephone counselling deserves a place in routine practice for UK Stop Smoking Services. It’s a good way to extend, rather than replace, face to face support, as it increases flexibility in scheduling contacts with clients. This allows for both greater frequency of contact and a more timely response to the probability of slips and relapse. It also increases the pool of clients who can utilize the service. The technological requirements of telephone counselling can be as basic as a mobile phone and a paper calendar. More important are the human resource requirements: the skills needed to provide effective behavioural support are different from those needed to dose pharmacotherapy. The intervention itself should be thoughtfully designed to maximize both specific and nonspecific counselling effects.
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About the presenter
Christopher M. Anderson serves as Program Director for the California Smokers’ Helpline, in the Moores Cancer Center of the University of California, San Diego. Chris oversees the operation of both the Helpline and the new Center for Tobacco Cessation, a training and technical assistance provider for the state of California. He has worked with the Helpline since 1992, when it became the first statewide, publicly supported, proactive ‘quitline’, or telephone counselling service for tobacco cessation. It was recognized in 2004 with an Award for Program Excellence by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
He has been active in identifying research needs in the field of tobacco cessation, developing counselling protocols for various populations, and planning, implementing and evaluating intervention studies. Publications co-authored by Chris and his UCSD colleagues are among the most frequently cited papers on quitlines. He has consulted with a number of state health departments, tobacco control foundations, the North American Quitline Consortium, the World Bank, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he served as lead writer for Telephone Quitlines: A Resource for Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.
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