| About T-Free: Tobacco Free Tompkins |
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Tobacco Free Tompkins (T-Free) is a partnership of community organizations and individuals dedicated to reducing the social and economic burden of tobacco use in Tompkins County by working toward these goals:
T-Free: Tobacco Free Tompkins is a Community Partner of the New York State Tobacco Control Program, and is funded by a grant to the Tompkins County Health Department from the New York State Department of Health. End of Year Report, 2006–07 grant year
T-Free Active Partners
New York State Tobacco Control Program (NYTCP)
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Report: Health and Financial Impact of Not Paying Cigarette Taxes (Download pdf, 577KB) |
In the 2006 IER, we made the following recommendations:
ES.2 Summary of Progress Since 2006 IER
As a result of past efforts to expand the program’s capacity and effectiveness, NYTCP was positioned to take full advantage of the budget increase beginning April 1, 2006, by expanding existing initiatives. The program increased allocations for tobacco countermarketing efforts, community interventions (i.e., School Policy Partners, Cessation Centers, Community Partnerships), the New York Smokers’ Quitline, and Promising Interventions grants, among other initiatives.
Once the program’s media plan was fully implemented in early 2007, NYTCP was able to exceed the previous recommendation to reach at least 60% of its target audience with evidence-based advertisements. In addition to high levels of awareness, New Yorkers had positive reactions to these advertisements in early 2007. Unfortunately, bureaucratic and political delays once again prevented NYTCP from implementing its media plan sooner and reaching its full potential in 2006. Despite the availability of additional resources for paid media, awareness of tobacco countermarketing messages among New Yorkers plateaued in 2006 after steady annual increases from 2003 to 2005. With respect to other recommendations from the 2006 IER, NYTCP made good progress. The program more actively promoted the New York State Smokers’ Quitline with cost-effective Internet advertisements that contributed to record levels of Quitline service and nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) distribution in the past year. In addition, although the program did not include a call to action in advertisements focused on secondhand smoke exposure, the advertisements generally elicited positive feedback. Consistent with our recommendation, there appeared to be no significant gaps in Community Partner activities associated with contract renewals. Finally, the program conducted research to identify promising strategies to reduce point-of-purchase cigarette advertising.
ES.3 2007 IER Conclusions and Recommendations
Conclusions
Tobacco Use. It appears that NYTCP’s recent and past efforts are beginning to have an impact on tobacco use. In 2006, the prevalence of youth and adult smoking declined faster in New York than in the United States as a whole. In addition, the use of other tobacco products by youth and adults also declined. However, tobacco use did not decline at the same rate among all adult populations in New York (e.g., Medicaid recipients, adults with self-reported mental health problems). NYTCP will need to address these gaps moving forward.
Tobacco Countermarketing. NYTCP continues to make progress with countermarketing efforts by using high quality, high sensation value messages. Unfortunately, NYTCP’s progress has been slowed once again by unnecessary bureaucratic and political delays despite the program’s efforts to plan in a timely manner.
New York State Smokers’ Quitline. The Quitline continues to provide high quality service, and, with the additional NRT, smokers who call the Quitline are more likely to successfully quit compared with previous years when NRT was not available. In addition, the Quitline received a record number of calls in the past year. There are, however, periods when the demand for the Quitline exceeds its capacity, and the program must better coordinate paid media with Quitline capacity. Although the Quitline is a helpful resource for smokers, health care providers, and others in New York, it currently reaches approximately 3% of the smokers in New York. We recommend exploring ways to increase this reach to approximately 5%.
Community Mobilization. Turning to the Cessation Center initiative, recent data suggest that after the first 2 years of the intervention, the Cessation Centers are beginning to have an impact on short- and intermediate-term outcomes. Health care provider organization administrators are more aware of the Cessation Centers and of other cessation resources in the state. In addition, an increasing percentage of health care provider organizations have adopted formal guidelines for addressing smoking cessation. Although we did not observe progress in the ultimate objective—to increase systems that screen all patients for tobacco use and prompt providers to provide brief advice to quit—the Cessation Centers appear to be making good progress. With respect to other community-based interventions, it is difficult to evaluate their progress because their interventions are more diffuse. In addition, the goal of these initiatives is to change community norms about tobacco use by changing policies in a number of settings in order to curb the influence of tobacco advertising, sponsorship, and promotion. This is a challenging task, and the Community Partners are struggling to develop the necessary skills and strategies to effect change. It is likely that these initiatives will take years to have an impact.
Recommendations
In summary, we make the following recommendations:
To achieve the NYTCP 2010 objective of 1 million fewer smokers, we recommend the following:
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