Service Effectiveness
Launching Quitlines
Monitoring and EvaluationService Effectiveness
One of the most important steps in evaluating Quitlines is to determine how many callers actually quit using tobacco and to what extent, if any, this can be attributed to the Quitline’s services. Well evaluated and documented outcome data can help to justify the program’s efforts and to inform the stakeholders if your interventions are actually working.
Quit rates can be based upon self-reported or CO/ saliva nicotine test. They can be assessed as point prevalence (being found smoke free at a particular point) or as continuous abstinence (having remained smoke-free for the whole period-not a puff). Follow-ups can be at 4 weeks, 6 months and 1 year. Quitlines using stricter definitions for quit rate, such as 12-month continuous abstinence, may appear to have lower absolute quit rates than those with less stringent definitions, such as 7-day point prevalence (the percentage of participants who have been abstinent for 7 days at follow-up). Once the measure of a successful quit is chosen, the simplest approach is to calculate the percentage of Quitline callers who have quit smoking by a particular point in time (for example, 6 months after their initial call). This provides a general idea of how successful callers are in quitting.
Number of calls and users
Potential call volumes and types of callers to a Quitline service can be estimated by looking at your national public health data of smoking prevalence survey including the number of smoker and intention to quit smoking(example is WHO Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS)). The call traffic and volume might be directly affected by Quitline promotion and indirectly affected by quality of Quitline service. Knowing these call volumes can help you plan the capacity of Quitline service regarding the appropriate counseling time per person, the possible number of counseling sessions per counselor per day, and allowable working time for counselors. All this data will form a part of your quality assurance program.
Successful Quit Attempt
A successful Quit attempt is the most important factor to evaluate to measure the short or long term outcomes of a Quitline service. Quit rates can vary dramatically depending on how they are calculated. When there is no randomized control group for comparison, an evaluation report must clearly address certain issues so that the results can be interpreted correctly.
Generally, Quitlines using stricter definitions for quit rate, such as 12-month continuous abstinence, may appear to have lower absolute quit rates than those with less stringent definitions, such as 7-day point prevalence (the percentage of participants who have been abstinent for 7 days at follow-up). Once the measure of a successful quit is chosen, the simplest approach is to calculate the percentage of Quitline callers who have quit smoking by a particular point in time (for example, 6 months after their initial call). This provides a general idea of how successful callers are in quitting.
For more comparability and precision of quit rate, items as below should be reported together.
- Complete account of how many callers are contacting the Quitline.
- Baseline caller characteristics in the evaluation sample that may predict quitting success or failure, such as the number of cigarettes smoked and intention to quit.
- Long-term continuous abstinence rate of all participants who agreed to receive counseling, calculated by dividing the number of participants who report that they have not used tobacco for a stated length of time (e.g., 6 or 12 months) by the number of participants who were reached for follow-up.
- Contact rate for the evaluation sample, because loss to follow-up can also affect the quit rate.？Result of additional analysis on those lost to follow-up
