Population intervention to reduce harms of smoking or alcohol use

Abstract:

Background and Purpose:

Smoking and alcohol use are the two out of the four leading lifestyle risk factors for non-communicable diseases worldwide, and cause tremendous health and economic burden particularly for developing countries. Our research group aims in reducing these addictive behaviours and the related harms through population based approaches. We are keen in developing brief, scalable, sustainable and effective interventions which will be translated into practice and influence the policy. Effectiveness of these innovative interventions are assessed rigorously using large scale pragmatic randomised controlled trials to generate highest level of evidence. Some of these interventions have been used currently in Hong Kong and the region. More proactive and innovative interventions leveraging the advanced mobile-phone technologies are currently being developed and tested. Disseminating these evidence in top journal is one of our priorities.

Research Questions:
1. What are the effective population-based interventions for reducing smoking and alcohol use?
2. How to measure the engament of mHealth intervention for reducing smoking and alcohol, and to quatify their influence on the effects?
3. What are the effective policies for tobacco control in Hong Kong?
4. Is it feasiable to set up a internation framework such as FCTC for alcohol control globablly?

Skills and experience required for the project:

a. Preferred discipline: health-related, social science, psychology, and computer engineering
b. Project skills: basic knowledge on statistics or data science
c. Other criteria: interested in developing and testing new behavioural interventions

Reference: https://sctc.nursing.hku.hk/