Ms Zoe Swithenbank
Zoe is a PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University, funded by the SSA. Her PhD is in behavioural interventions for smoking cessation in substance use treatment services. She also works as a research assistant for the University of Aberdeen on the ICSmoke project, a large scale systematic review of behavioural interventions for smoking cessation. Prior to this, she completed a PGDip in Health Economics at the University of Aberdeen, and an MSc in Public Health: Addictions at LJMU, and has worked in community and residential substance use treatment services. Zoe also volunteers with a national mental health charity and is passionate about user involvement. Her research interests include substance use, mental health and research methodology.
Recommendations for the reporting of smoking cessation randomised control trials: Initial outcomes from an expert consensus meeting
Aims: To develop recommendations for improved reporting of randomised controlled trials of smoking cessation interventions.
Methods: We followed the Guidance for Developers of Health Research Reporting Guidelines. With the CONSORT-SPI (Social and Psychological Interventions) reporting tool as the backbone, potential additions were identified from other tools (e.g., TIDieR, Russell) and input from the experts. Experts were asked to vote online on the importance of 10 proposed changes on a 9 point Likert scale (1-3 = not important, 4-6 = important but not critical, 7-9 = critical). We then organised a full-day meeting to discuss these results and cast a vote: Not critical or Critical. Votes with at least 75% critical were considered to be necessary additions to CONSORT-SPI.
Results: Seventeen experts completed the online voting. The results were discussed with 15 international experts attending the meeting. Agreement was achieved on 12 additions to CONSORT-SPI covering the methodology section (e.g. how, where, when and by whom participants were recruited), result section (e.g. sample descriptives of those excluded, declined participation, non-responders, drop-out and discontinued the intervention, availability of the statistical scripts for running the analysis over the outcome dataset and of the statistical outputs and number of participants who smoke, quit, non-responders, dropout).
Conclusions: A consensus exercise identified 12 additional items of information that should be included in reports of randomised controlled trials of smoking cessation interventions. The next stage is to draft guidance on how these items can best be applied to randomised controlled trials of smoking cessation interventions.