The NHS is offering lung health checks to people aged 55 to 74 who smoke or have smoked, to look for signs of lung cancer. This is a good opportunity to encourage smokers to quit, as they will already be thinking about their lung health.
‘Opportunistic settings’ like lung health checks, where smokers can be presented with information about quitting even though they haven’t sought it out, can be a good place to encourage people to quit. Using this type of setting to deliver health promotion information can increase the number and diversity of people reached.
However, a problem with encouraging people to quit smoking in opportunistic settings is that they haven’t already decided to quit. Any programme designed to be delivered in this type of setting must take this into account.
Project aims
We plan to develop a programme encouraging people to stop smoking, to be delivered in opportunistic settings like lung health checks.
The aim of this project is to explore ‘readiness to quit’ in smokers attending lung health checks. We will explore how readiness to quit may be influenced by the lung screening process, including how it might change at various steps in this process (from invitation to receipt of results).
This will help us understand how and when to support smokers to quit at lung health checks.
What we hope to achieve
The results of this study will help us understand if additional support needs to be provided in opportunistic settings to encourage people to stop smoking. In particular, the study will help design a programme encouraging readiness to quit, that can then be supplemented by more traditional smoking cessation support.