ACCESS (Access strategies for teen smoking cessation in Europe)

Good news: Less and less teenagers in Europe are smoking. However, one out of three European adolescents remains to be a current smoker. Even worse, the rate of heavy smokers seems not to decline.

Many of these smoking adolescents want to stop (about two thirds) but they are not very successful in quitting. The main reason for this might be that they don’t utilise cessation interventions. This is where ACCESS starts.

ACCESS aims at developing guidelines on how to motivate adolescents to use existing cessation aids. Guiding ideas underlying the ACCESS agenda are:

• Adolescents can be motivated in every youth setting (i.e. family, schools, communities, sports clubs, internet…)
• Motivation has to be youth oriented
• Motivating strategies might be different for different settings, gender, cultural background etc. but very similar for interventions targeting other health or problem behaviors.

The project started in September 2009 and has received funding from the European Union, in the framework of the Health Programme.

It consists of 11 partners across Europe and is coordinated by the "IFT - Institut für Therapieforschung" (Munich), Dr. Anneke Bühler.

On the following pages you will find more information about the group, the project and our dissemination activities as well as a contact form to get in touch with us.