Smoking Cessation in Hong Kong

My time in Hong Kong was an incredible experience and better than I ever expected. I can’t believe it’s over and I am home! Although we had many setbacks related to our project, I think Alexa and I were able to learn a lot about the health care system in Hong Kong. We started our project by joining with a researcher who currently works with children, and we originally planned to assist him in promoting social harmony and well being in Chinese children and ethnic minority children. However, we realized after several meetings that this project would not be possible for several reasons. We had to find a new project and eventually paired up with Dr. Sophia Chan who works with smoking cessation.

Smoking is a very big problem in Hong Kong and 68.2% of smokers begin smoking before the age of 20. Dr. Chan and her research team started the Youth Quitline at The University of Hong Kong, which is the only resource that targets the youth population. This resource is effective and provides service to many young people trying to quit smoking, but the research team has been looking for ways to improve the Quitline. Hong Kong is very technologically advanced, so we decided to focus on implementing web-based and phone-based technology to the Youth Quitline. Because of the limited time we had after many issues with finding our project, we did not actually get to implement these services. Instead, we helped the Quitline start the research process to find information about technology services that have assisted with smoking cessation in the past.

The day before we left Hong Kong we gave a presentation to Dr. Chan and her research team about our findings. We gave suggestions on how they can improve the Quitline and therefore make it more accessible to the youth population in HK. Our two big suggestions were to improve the website by adding a feature that allows users create an account so that the website will be personalized for them, and to add a text messaging system. After we presented, we had a discussion about our ideas and we were also able to hear many interesting things about smoking and the Quitline’s efforts to help the young residents of HK directly from the research team. One of the research assistants is also a counselor at the Quitline and was able to give us a lot of valuable information about some of the issues that arise during counseling. A lot of these problems would be eliminated with the use of our additional technology features. The research team really liked our ideas and is excited to start to implement some of them. They promised to keep us updated on their progress and said they will continue to ask us for our opinions. We think it would be great for the people who go to Hong Kong next year to work with Dr. Chan on this project and develop the Quitline even more.

After our presentation, the research team treated us to Dim Sum, our last traditional Chinese meal! Later that night we said goodbye to our friends and also met three of the students coming to Case in April! They are very excited to come to our school and see what nursing is like in the US and we are excited to show them around! Although I miss Hong Kong already, I am excited to be home and can’t wait to share our experiences with everyone back at school and hear about everyone else’s semester!