Jamie Brown*, University College London, London, United Kingdom Matthew Walmsley, English Department of Health, London, United Kingdom Robert West, University College London, London, United Kingdom Track: Research Presentation Topic: Public (e-)health, population health technologies, surveillance Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Mermaid Room: Room 1 - Newgate Date: 2013-09-23 02:00 PM – 03:30 PM Last modified: 2013-09-25

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Background: A national marketing campaign based on psychological theory and evidence and operating through both traditional and new media was launched by the English Department of Health in late 2012. The campaign was complemented by an accompanying website that offered brief advice on smoking cessation, motivational text-messaging and an app that provided ongoing support and self-monitoring tools. The campaign was underpinned by the idea from social contagion theory that one could use messaging to amplify a campaign by turning it into a movement. The portmanteau ‘Stoptober’ is a combination of Stop and October and was designed to build engagement by association with other popular national events that have successfully used similar monikers (e.g., ‘Movember’) and to encourage dissemination by word-of-mouth and social media. In addition to starting a movement in which smokers would stop smoking together, a key component of the campaign was to set a SMART goal for smokers to be smoke-free for 28 days and provide digital support to help them achieve the goal. The accompanying message was that they would be at least 5 times more likely than they were at the start to become permanent ex-smokers.

Objective: To provide an independent assessment of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of Stoptober.

Methods: The design was a series cross-sectional household surveys of representative samples of the population in England conducted monthly between 2007 and 2012. A total of 130,307 adults (aged 16+) were surveyed of whom 32,772 reported past year smoking and were included in the study. To assess the effectiveness of Stoptober, the difference between the percentage of smokers making a past month quit attempt in October as compared with all other months was examined in both 2007-11 and 2012 as an interaction in a logistic regression model.

Results: There was an interaction between the weighted percentage of smokers attempting to quit in the month of October as compared with all other months and between the year of survey (OR=1.78, 95%CI=1.20-2.66). Simple effects revealed that in 2012 there was an increase in past month quitting during October as compared with all other months (9.1% vs. 6.3%; OR=1.49, 95%CI=1.05-2.14), whereas in 2007-11 there was a non-significant decrease during October (6.1% vs. 7.2%; OR=0.84, 95%CI=0.70-1.00). Assuming that 2.5% of attempts result in permanent success, the overall Stoptober effect of 3.9% (95%CI=0.9%-7.0%) suggested an additional 0.099% of the 8.5 million smokers in England quit permanently. The cost of Stoptober per smoker was £0.68. Using an established cost-effectiveness model, the discounted life years gained attributable to Stoptober per smoker stopping permanently in the modal age group 35–44 years was estimated to be 1.59. The resulting incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was £436.54 (95%CI=96.86-776.21). Similar ratios were estimated for the other age groups (range: £436.54-£639.50).

Conclusions: The national ‘Stoptober’ mass media smoking cessation campaign featuring digital support appears to have provided excellent value for money as a life-saving public health intervention.