Promoting smoking cessation in US hispanic adult smokers: Lessons learned from the smokefree espanol program

Background: The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Smokefree Espaņol project, the first federal Spanish language smoking cessation website, provides web and mobile cessation resources for Hispanic American smokers. Accounting for the unique smoking behaviors, motivations, and cessation needs of Hispanic Americans, Smokefree Espaņol offers users a tailored smoking cessation guide, interactive online quit tools, and free, culturally appropriate information on smoking topics. Throughout 2013, Smokefree Espaņol implemented an aggressive outreach plan to promote awareness and use of the program amongst Hispanic American smokers. This presentation will focus on results and lessons learned from this outreach. Methods: As part of an overarching outreach plan, Smokefree Espaņol ran three promotions throughout 2013: a two week New Year's web-based promotion of the Smokefree TXT en Espaņol text messaging cessation service; a multi-week promotion of the Smokefree Espaņol website; and a month long promotion of the re-designed website. Adopting an iterative approach, each promotion was expanded and honed using lessons learned from previous efforts. Results: Quantitative indicators of outreach effectiveness will be presented. Programmatic lessons learned will be discussed, including strategies for Spanish language outreach to US Hispanics, the effectiveness of dissemination tactics, and the importance of mobile outreach. Conclusions: The Smokefree Espaņol program is one of the few smoking cessation resources that engage Hispanic American smokers in their native language. Results indicate that Spanish language outreach in the United States can be a viable strategy for health practitioners, but only if extensive formative research is undertaken and culturally appropriate tactics are implemented.