Aims and objectives:
Campaign aims:
1. Reduce the fear of failure when making a quit attempt.
2. Generate requests for postal information about local NHS stop smoking services.
3. Raise awareness and understanding of the type of user-friendly help and support available from local NHS stop smoking services.
4. Increase number of people accessing local NHS stop smoking services.
The key campaign messages were:
1. Giving up smoking requires planning & preparation.
2. Smokers need not fear failure when using their NHS stop smoking service.
3. Local NHS stop smoking services are available throughout the region.
4. Advisors are empathetic and highly experienced.
5. This NHS service is a highly effective way of quitting and the first of its kind in the world.
Support for the change:
We have geared the service to match peak demand and experienced an opportunity to test the capacity of the service to its limit before initiating further action to compensate.
Phoenix hopes to run a smaller media campaign in Lincolnshire around Sept 05 where all coterminous partners around smoking cessation will come together with the Lincolnshire Media to coordinate 'Lincolnshire No Smoking Week'. We intend to learn from the mistakes that were made and enhance the benefits to increase our smoking cessation activity and to raise awareness of issues around health, finance etc to all smokers who have not yet made a decision to quit but may in the future.
Campaigns like this also reinforces and reminds recent quitters to the reasons why they have quit and why they should not relapse.
Patient and public influence:
Follow-ups to the campaign looked at:
1. Why the clients decided to quit and how the campaign helped.
2. How they prepared and planned to stop.
3. The support and advice available from the NHS stop smoking service.
4. How they stayed stopped at the trigger for relapse.
All this information was fed back into the service to assist Phoenix Advisors supporting new clients, which in turn would increase the quit rate percentage.
Impact on the workforce:
The information learned from this campaign has been added to the Phoenix Advisor training at both brief intervention (offering advice and signposting) and Step 2 (providing a clinic). There are also opportunities to develop new campaigns outside smoking cessation especially around other chronic disease management issues.
Phoenix staff are increasingly asked to provide expertise to other service staff around the country. Also, the Phoenix staff were involved in the local development of this campaign and were trained and gained valuable media skills experience on many levels including television, radio and newspapers.
Measuring the results:
All service partners involved monitored how many clients contacted them after being influenced by the campaign. The Helpline, NHS Direct and Yorkshire Television also provided data to evaluate the impact of this work.
An integrated approach was achieved and the campaign recognised as an excellent example of partnership working, involving public and private organisations and 20 NHS stop smoking services.
A steering group was set up and led by Lincolnshire consisting of communication leads, stop smoking coordinators, Calendar reps, and the Yorkshire and Humber regional coordinator for tobacco control. This was to:
1. Develop and direct the campaign to meet the needs of NHS stop smoking services.
2. Keep local services informed of the campaign's progress.
3. Coordinate and facilitate local publicity about the campaign.
4. Design, produce & distribute materials to support & raise awareness of the campaign.
The steering group would also:
1. Identify the campaign strap line (Call it Quits with Calendar).
2. Locate volunteers to be filmed.
3. Negotiate with the NHS Smoking Helpline/NHS Direct to handle phone calls and fulfil other campaign requirements.
4. Determine evaluation methods.
5. Develop promotional posters and information pack.
Improved performance:
As a new project, many of the people influenced and responding to this campaign indicated that they would not normally have sought support to quit at this time. The campaign was resulted in:
1. 1604 information packs being sent out, (double the amount predicted by the NHS).
2. 4218 interactive calls made in the Calendar region, (350% higher than previous year).
3. 228 people contact Lincolnshire stop smoking services for more information or referrals into service with possible over 100 of these going on to quit at 4-weeks.
4. Based on 350,000 to 450,000 viewers/show, it is estimated that the eight-day campaign offered nearly 3 million opportunities to see by viewers.
5. It is predicted that the campaign provided by Yorkshire Television was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Reflecting diversity:
This media campaign covers all of Yorkshire & Humberside, Lincolnshire, other parts of Trent and extends as far south as Bucks. Around 80% of Calendar viewers are in the C2, D and E socio-economic groups, the major target audience of the all 20 local stop smoking services in the Calendar region.
Work was also undertaken to coordinate this campaign with all the local media in Lincolnshire and some translation was done for the large West European population of Boston and South Holland.
Sharing the learning:
I have proposed that we develop a regional media campaign to cover the East Midlands so that all services within that boundary can benefit.
This type of media campaign on this scale also indicates that the model could easily be adopted for the new challenges facing PCTs with regard to improving working health and reducing health inequalities. These could include public health work around Obesity, alcohol, skin cancer etc.
Outstanding features:
The work was a fine example of collaboration between the NHS and the media. It is new, and the largest project of its kind and was very cost effective with Yorkshire & Humberside Government Office and Yorkshire TV meeting the cost.
It would have cost Phoenix in excess of £25,000 to achieve this level of 4-week quitters through the mainstream service.
