ESCAPE, a brief tailored smoking cessation intervention delivered by post and designed to reach a wide population of smokers, appears to increase the rate at which smokers try to stop, but if there is an effect on prolonged abstinence it is small.

Proactive recruitment methods can increase participation in smoking cessation trials and weighting the target sample in favour of more deprived areas will recruit a more representative sample. The number and timing of mailings to potential participants can also increase recruitment.

No abstract