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Vital Stories

Beijing workshop focuses on protecting China from second-hand smoke

China is home to the world’s largest population of smokers. In addition to the direct health harms to smokers themselves, a considerable number of non-smokers – especially women and children – suffer health harms related to their exposure to second-hand smoke. In recognition of this major public health problem, Beijing, Shenzhen, Anshan, Qingdao, Changchun, Tangshan and Lanzhou have adopted strict smoke-free laws – but a fully comprehensive national smoke-free law would protect many more Chinese citizens.

Smoke-free legislation is one of the topics being discussed this week at the National Tobacco Control and Health Communication Skills Training Workshop in Beijing. Around 100 health experts from China’s 32 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities are attending the meeting, which is being hosted by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Health Education Center, Chinese Health Education and Promotion Association, Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control and Beijing Health Education Association.

The purpose of the meeting is to help build sustainable capacity in delivering health education across China’s health education institute system. After the meeting, participants will have the knowledge and tools to better support local tobacco control mass media campaigns, as well as the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s “Healthy China-Smoke Free Life” campaign, which aims to advocate the benefits of a smoke-free life and build support for national smoke-free legislation.

Participants have heard a fascinating first-hand account of Beijing’s path to implementing its comprehensive smoke-free law, from the Director of the Office of the Beijing Patriotic Health Campaign Committee, Liu Zejun. As Beijing’s example shows, a good communication strategy is essential to successfully implementing and building awareness and compliance with smoke-free laws.

For our part, experts from Vital Strategies have attended the meeting to share our experiences of designing and implementing mass and social media campaigns to support smoke-free laws in China and in many other countries across the world.  Adopting proven, best practice approaches is much more time and cost effective, as well as having the greatest impact in delivering population-level changes in attitudes and behavior, whether at city, state or national level. We’ll also be sharing examples of Public Service Announcements that have been evaluated as being particularly effective among test audiences, which could be used by local or national authorities.

We don’t yet know whether China will adopt a fully comprehensive national smoke-free law, as recommended in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, but this workshop has played an important part in ensuring that China’s health system is ready to support change at local or national level, helping to improve the health of many of China’s people in the years ahead.