The National Cancer Institute (INCa), in conjunction with a regional health authorities and local health promotion players, has chosen the OncoAge Federation to pilot the “TABADO 2” smoking cessation support system in the Southern Region. In 2018, the INCa decided to coordinate the deployment of the programme in seven French regions. This project targets teenage smokers, aged between 15 and 20 years old, following a training course in a vocational high school, CFA and MFR throughout the south region (PACA). The programme’s initiation phase is currently underway in order to prepare its deployment for the 2020/2021 school year.

The TABADO programme helps teenagers to quit smoking and explores new aspects in supporting smoking cessation in a high-risk adolescent population. It combines a twofold approach already recognized as effective for adults and integrates the main criteria for successful stopping smoking among adolescents: accessibility through free access and proximity. In partnership with the Addictology Support and Prevention care center (CSAPA), TABADO is mobilizing all the players in the health sector, as well as those in national education and agriculture, around a major public health issue that is part of the national tobacco control programme, thus creating a collective dynamic between the different parties.

The aim of the system is to identify and prevent smoking rather than to repair it, and it introduces a shift from an individual issue to collective support. Marked by its empirical dimension and taking up the codes of the sporting world, the project is built around three key stages:

• An initial information session to present the effects of smoking and its consequences on health, to motivate and recruit smokers to follow the programme with the aim of stopping smoking but also to inform students of the “TABADO Games” aimed at creating an emulation around participation in the programme via an inter-establishment competition to stop smoking.

• Individual consultations led by a health professional trained in tobaccoology with the aim of making a personalised diagnosis of the subject’s smoking, proposing an adapted withdrawal and possibly delivering a free nicotine substitute treatment (TSN).

• Motivational workshops for 5 to 10 people, allowing a real follow-up of the students, but also to reinforce motivation and support the cessation in order to prevent relapses (supportive psychotherapy).

These three steps constitute the path towards quitting smoking, they are also the way to join the challenge of the “TABADO Games” so that a collective support emerges within the school. Effective, free and motivating, TABADO has proven its worth with twice as many smokers quitting in the establishments offering it. Intervening early on one’s addiction is effective in reducing the risks to one’s health. The development of the TABADO program in several French regions ensures that the system can be deployed on a large scale. Its ambition is to protect young people as a priority and to fight against social inequalities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more information: www.tabado.fr