A lot of time and money has been invested in programmes to help those who smoke to quit. However, there is currently not enough information about the best way to encourage smokers to enter these programmes. This review aims to identify whether certain recruitment strategies can help to increase the number of smokers enrolling into quit services. It also aims to determine whether these recruitment strategies have any impact on people successfully quitting smoking at six months or longer.

This review covers 19 studies, with almost 15,000 participants, but the significant differences across these studies meant that we were unable to draw conclusive answers to our research questions. Our findings do, however, suggest that the following elements could result more people joining quit smoking programmes: (1) recruitment strategies tailored to the individual; (2) proactive strategies; and (3) increased contact time with potential participants. This review also highlights the areas within this field that need more attention: identifying the elements of a recruitment strategy that are more likely to effectively engage smokers; whether or not elements of recruitment strategies have an impact on quit rates; and identifying those recruitment strategies (or different combinations of particular recruitment strategies with certain smoking cessation programmes) that work better for different population groups.