Motivational interviewing for smoking cessation

Abstract

Does motivational interviewing help people to quit smoking? BackgroundMotivational interviewing is a type of counselling that can be used to help people to stop smoking.It aims to help people explore the reasons that they may feel unsure about quitting and find ways to make them feel more willing and able to stop smoking.Rather than telling the person why and how they should change their behaviour, counsellors try to help people to choose to change their own behaviour, increasing their confidence that they can succeed.This review explores whether motivational interviewing helps more people to stop smoking than no treatment, or other types of stop smoking treatment.It also looks at whether longer motivational interviewing, with more counselling sessions, helps more people to quit than shorter motivational interviewing with fewer sessions. Study characteristicsThis review included 37 trials covering over 15,000 people who smoked tobacco.Studies were conducted in a lot of different types of people, including people with health problems or drug use problems, young people, homeless people, and people who had been arrested or were in prison.Some people felt ready to quit smoking and others did not.Motivational interviewing was provided in one to 12 sessions and took from as little as five minutes, to as much as eight hours, to deliver.Studies lasted for at least six months.The evidence is up to date to August 2018. Key resultsThere was not enough information available to decide whether motivational interviewing helped more people to stop smoking than no stop smoking treatment.People were slightly more likely to stop smoking if they were provided with motivational interviewing rather than another type of treatment to stop smoking, but our findings suggest that there is still a chance that motivational interviewing could also reduce a person's chances of quitting compared with other stop smoking treatments.This means more research is needed to decide whether motivational interviewing can help more people to quit than other types of treatment.Using longer motivational interviewing with more treatment sessions may help more people to give up smoking than shorter motivational interviewing with fewer sessions, however more research is needed to be sure that this is the case.We also looked at whether being provided with motivational interviewing to quit smoking increased people's well-being.Most studies did not provide any information about this, and so more studies are needed to answer this question. Quality of the evidenceThere is low-quality evidence looking at whether motivational interviewing helps more people to quit smoking than no treatment.This means it is difficult to know whether motivational interviewing helps people to quit smoking or not, and more studies are needed.The quality of the evidence was also low for all of the other questions we asked about quitting smoking, which means that our findings may Motivational interviewing for smoking cessation (Review)