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Increasing Tobacco Use Cessation: Quitline Interventions

Quitlines use the telephone to provide evidence-based behavioral counseling and support to help tobacco users who want to quit. Counseling is provided by trained cessation specialists who follow standardized protocols that may include several sessions delivered over one or more months.

Quitline counseling is widely accessible, convenient to use, and generally provided at no cost to users. Content may be adapted for specific populations, and tailored for individual clients. Counseling may be:

  • Reactive (tobacco user or recent quitter initiates contacts), or
  • Proactive (tobacco user or cessation specialist makes initial contact, and the cessation specialist schedules follow-up calls).

Quitlines may provide additional interventions such as mailed self-help materials, integrated web-based and text-messaging support, and evidence-based tobacco cessation medications that have been approved by the FDA (Fiore et al., 2008).

Summary of Task Force Recommendations & Findings

The Community Preventive Services Task Force recommends quitline interventions, particularly proactive quitlines (i.e. those which offer follow-up counseling calls), based on strong evidence of effectiveness in increasing tobacco cessation among clients interested in quitting. Evidence was considered strong based on findings from 58 trials of proactive telephone counseling when provided alone or in combination with additional interventions.

Three interventions effective at increasing use of quitlines are:

  1. Mass-reach health communication interventions that combine cessation messages with a quitline number
  2. Provision of evidence-based tobacco cessation medications for clients interested in quitting
  3. Quitline referral interventions for health care systems and providers.
Evidence also indicates that quitlines can help to expand the use of evidence-based services by tobacco users in populations that historically have had the most limited access to and use of evidence-based tobacco cessation treatments.

Task Force Finding and Rationale Statement

The Task Force finding presented on this page was made in August 2012. It was based on evidence from a systematic review published in 2009 (Stead, Perera & Lancaster, search period through March 2009) combined with more recent evidence (search period March 2009-February 2011).

The review was conducted on behalf of the Task Force by a team of specialists in systematic review methods, and in research, practice and policy related to tobacco use. Subscribe to be notified as new materials on this topic become available.

Publications

The findings and results of this systematic review have not been published. Read other Community Guide publications about Tobacco Use in our library.

References

Stead LF, Perera R, Lancaster T. Telephone counseling for smoking cessation. Adobe PDF File [PDF - 1.1 MB] External Web Site Icon Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD002850. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD002850.pub2.



Disclaimer

The findings and conclusions on this page are those of the Community Preventive Services Task Force and do not necessarily represent those of CDC.

Sample Citation

The content of publications of the Guide to Community Preventive Services is in the public domain. Citation as to source, however, is appreciated. Sample citation: Guide to Community Preventive Services. Increasing tobacco use cessation: Increasing tobacco use cessation: quitline interventions. www.thecommunityguide.org/tobacco/cessation/quitlines.html. Last updated: MM/DD/YYYY.

Review completed: August 2012