PERSonalised Incentives for Supporting Tobacco cessation (PERSIST) among healthcare employees: evaluation and lessons learned 359 11 Introduction Despite the majority of people who smoke wanting to quit,1, 2 success rates of quitting attempts are generally low. A promising method to encourage smoking cessation is the provision of financial incentives upon validated abstinence, as the desired behaviour – smoking cessation – is made more attractive by rewarding it.3 Such incentive-based approaches often follow a “one size fits all” approach. Previous literature however has shown that individuals may have different preferences when it comes to rewards.4 Deposit based incentive programmes can benefit people who have a low tendency to quit and who prefer delayed rewards over shorter immediate ones. Financial incentive research has most often been implemented in the US context.3 An incentive-based smoking cessation trial in the workplace in the Netherlands showed 41% abstinence after 12 months with incentives, versus 26% without incentives.5 In the Netherlands, smoking rates have been declining but at a rather slow pace, between 2014 and 2020 rates decreased from 25.7% to 20.2% current smokers.6 Combining financial incentives with deposits, where participants put in their own money which is returned when the desired goal is reached, can be especially beneficial among people with these personality traits, as shown by Halpern et al.7 Despite the effectiveness of such deposits, this study also showed the unpopularity of deposits, with only 13.7% of participants accepting a deposit scheme compared to 90.0% for reward-based programs.8 Incorporating individual preferences into incentive programs - in other words, personalization - yields the potential to further increase the effectiveness of incentives to promote long-term abstinence. Although personal characteristics have been shown to be important determinants of the effectiveness of incentivebased smoking cessation programs, we are unaware of any attempts to incorporate personalization in the design of such programs. Within the PERSIST trial (PERSonalised Incentives for Sustained smoking cessaTion) we aimed to investigate the effectiveness of personalized incentives in addition to groupbased smoking cessation training among health care workers.9 In a survey among employees of a Dutch regional hospital about 7% of employees self-identified as daily smoker.10 In an attempt to work towards a smoke-free generation by 2040, the Dutch National Prevention Agreement requires university hospitals to be smoke-free from mid-2020 and all healthcare facilities by 2025. Furthermore,
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