Smoking Cessation - You can help!

Smoking remains a prevalent problem in Hong Kong that poses a significant health risk to the population, despite the gradual prevalence drop to 9.5% in 2021. Other fancy modes of smoking like E-cigarettes are also getting more popular with time, and these alternatives are found no healthier than conventional tobacco.

Quitting from smoking is well known to bring lots of health benefits, in both short and long terms. However, reasons of quitting vary. In the Thematic Household Survey conducted by HKSAR Government in 2021, about half of them are related to reasons other than own’s health, e.g. avoiding affecting family members, saving money etc.

In the same survey, around 72% of the subjects haven’t been asked about the smoking status by any health care professional they have visited in the past 1 year.
Therefore, as health care professionals, while providing various medical care services to clients, we should take this golden opportunity to ask more about the habit and motivate smokers to stop.

Ideally, a more comprehensive motivational interview or brief advice technique is adopted to persuade smokers to quit. But this may not be feasible in our hectic working environment.
Therefore, Very Brief Advice (VBA) should be the practical way forward. It is simple and usually takes less than 1 minute. Despite the simplicity, it is well established and considered effective in serving the motivating purpose worldwide. Clients should also be reassessed on smoking status every visit and VBA repeated if not yet quitted.

In Hong Kong, a wide variety of smoking cessation services is already in place to provide support, which we could make good use of and refer after VBA.
Together, we all can help to fight smoking!