Quit program lacking

More than 20,000 people signed up for a 28-day, quit-tobacco-smoking program run by Singapore’s Health Promotion Board (HPB) last year, but only about 10 percent stayed away from cigarettes for the duration of the program, according to a story in The Straits Times.
“It’s not as high as we’d like, but internationally it compares quite well,” said Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Home Affairs Amrin Amin.
He was giving updates on the HPB’s I Quit 28-Day Countdown program, which was said to have given smokers the knowledge and motivation to give up their habit, while at the same time launching a new campaign to raise awareness about smoking’s downsides.
Earlier this year, the government announced it aimed to reduce the number of smokers to under 10 percent of the population by 2020. Last year the smoking rate was 12 percent.
Getting people to give up smoking was not a one-off effort, and various factors played a part in getting people to quit, said Amrin. The government would study ways to strengthen the process over the next year or so.
According to a study conducted by the HPB last year, the top three factors that would motivate smokers to quit were health, family and finances.
Singapore is one of a number of countries that have banned the sale of all vaping products.