PERSonalised Incentives for Supporting Tobacco cessation (PERSIST) among healthcare employees: a randomised controlled trial protocol 351 10 Patient and Public Involvement Participants were not involved in designing the trial. Once the results are published participants will be informed about the publication by email. This email will be drafted suitable for a non-specialist audience. Public involvement will be sought through the Erasmus Initiative Smarter Choices for Better Health. Ethics and dissemination The study protocol has been assessed by the Erasmus MC Medical Ethics Committee (MEC-2019-0140). The committee decided that according to the Dutch Human Research Law (WMO) the protocol required no formal ethical approval. All participants will provide informed consent for participating in the study. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. On completion of the trial, and after the publication of the results, data requests can be submitted to the corresponding author at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Discussion We present the protocol of the “PERSonalised Incentives for Supporting Tobacco cessation” (PERSIST) trial. The aim of the trial is to evaluate the effectiveness of personalised incentives in addition to group-based smoking cessation training on sustained smoking abstinence among hospital employees compared to groupbased training alone. Personalisation entails that participants are advised and can choose from four different incentive schemes: standard, ascending, descending, and deposit-based. Strengths and limitations The PERSIST trial is unique in its approach to personalising incentives to promote smoking cessation. Strong links between personal characteristics and effectiveness of incentives to promote smoking cessation have been demonstrated previously, however, to our knowledge, the effectiveness of personalised incentives has not been studied before.14 Another unique element of the PERSIST trial is that participants receive personalised advice for an incentive scheme, based on personal characteristics, yet are free to deviate from the advised scheme. Voluntary choice with a personalised default is a common tool in behavioural economics to nudge people towards the scheme that is plausibly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw