PERSonalised Incentives for Supporting Tobacco cessation (PERSIST) among healthcare employees: evaluation and lessons learned 361 11 unexpected employee turnover and attrition.9 Hence, we could compare a control arm without incentives, with a personalized incentive arm. The trial was not intended nor powered to explore the effect of the individual incentive schemes within the incentive arm. Participating hospitals promoted group-based training, without mentioning financial incentives, among their employees through various channels, such as intranet pages, screensavers, and internal emails. Potentially interested employees were invited to attend information sessions, where the possibility of participating in the trial and earning rewards (i.e., personalized incentives) was also introduced, which was the preferred order of information provision by the participating hospitals. At the time of participant inclusion, all participating hospitals had a completely smoke-free policy, including smoke-free outdoor hospital grounds. Also, according to hospital policy smoking is not allowed when wearing a hospital uniform. Seven 90 minute session over eight weeks were provided by SineFuma, a company specialized in supporting smoking cessation, and took place at the participating hospitals’ locations. The groups consisted of three to 16 participants. The completion of group-based training sessions was mandatory for the participants. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, some training sessions were conducted online. Upon completing the baseline questionnaires, participants were 1:1 randomized into a control arm, receiving no incentives, and an intervention arm, where participants were eligible to receive personalized incentives. A computergenerated allocation sequence was provided by ALEA randomisation service, in collaboration with the Erasmus MC Clinical Trial Centre. More information regarding randomization can be found in our protocol.9 Incentives Upon completing the eight week smoking cessation training participants in the intervention arm could receive incentives. Incentives were provided as vouchers that could be spent in major Dutch (web)shops. Personalization was operationalized by offering four different incentive schemes from which participants could choose. Across the different schemes, the monetary value of the incentives varied over time and the potential total financial rewards also differed. The four incentive schemes were (Figure 1): 1) a standard scheme offering €50, €50, €50 and €200 upon validated abstinence at t=0 (i.e., directly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw