Marc Willemsen endowed professor for Tobacco Control Research at CAPHRI
The government can put a wide range of measures in place to deter smoking. It can introduce intensive campaigns, for example, or further increase excise duty. “But this is not happening automatically”, concludes Marc Willemsen, who has recently been appointed as endowed chair for Tobacco Control Research at CAPHRI. “The process here is slower than in countries like Canada and Ireland, and I’m wondering why. This is one of the questions that I’ll focus on at CAPHRI.”
Willemsen will combine his professorship with his work at Stivoro, the Dutch centre of expertise for tobacco control. When he joined Stivoro in 1998, he succeeded the only researcher at Stivoro and established the basis for today’s knowledge research department. Today, he manages 11 researchers at Stivoro. “Smoking is the number one avoidable cause of death in our country. I’ve always been idealistic and would like to dedicate myself to public health in my academic career. That’s why I made a conscious choice for Stivoro.”
Willemsen came into contact with smoking research and Stivoro many years ago, after completing his psychology degree in Nijmegen and starting his career as a research assistant at UM’s Department of Health Promotion and Health Education. He obtained his doctorate on the effectiveness of quit-smoking campaigns and developed an intervention programme for employees, which was adopted by Stivoro. As a postdoc, he then wrote a report for the Netherlands School of Public Health (NSPH) on the effectiveness of policy measures that the government can put in place to deter smoking.
Advertising agencies
Willemsen found himself at Stivoro as a result of this role. “Early on in my career, campaign content was still strongly influenced by the advertising agencies that Stivoro worked with. Today, Stivoro profiles itself far more as a knowledge centre. The information we use in our campaigns and their effectiveness are based on academic research. This is important, because ZonMw [the Netherlands organisation for health research and development] assesses campaigns on the quality of their scientific basis.”
Caphri is an important collaboration partner for Stivoro. “We’ve been working together on the development of interventions for a long time now, with Stivoro being responsible for national implementation.” In the future, this collaboration will continue and – thanks to his appointment as endowed professor, says Willemsen – also be extended. “The appointment will support me in my work, which is something I’m very happy about.”
Willemsen considers his professorship a good addition to existing quit-smoking research at CAPHRI. The development of interventions and the effectiveness of these interventions are already receiving full attention, as are the development of therapies and the consequences of passive smoking. “I’ll now add to this with research on regulations and their impact on public health. So my attention is not so much on the individual smoker, but more on the population of smokers and passive smokers.”
The tobacco industry
In the Netherlands, 28% of the population still smokes, in contrast with 14% in the state of California, for example. Willemsen wonders why the process is so slow here and why the government is not automatically putting in place all of the measures that have proven to effectively deter smoking. “I know that the big multinationals in the tobacco industry are playing an important role here.”
In his research, Willemsen will focus not only on the government itself, but also on the effectiveness of government measures. “I want to know how we can make the measures more effective, so that we can achieve a further decrease in the number of smokers.” As such, his responsibilities include major research being done by CAPHRI, in which a large panel of smokers is monitored over a certain period of time. “This research is part of a broader, cross-country comparative study, in which we are seeking to identify why certain measures work better in one country than in another country, such as the introduction of smoke-free hospitality venues. Incidentally, in doing so we don’t look solely at the measures put in place, but also at the smokers themselves. Which psychological determinants of quitting do successful measures target?”
Finally, Willemsen mentions the grant that he recently landed for research into the question of how the use of aids can be improved. “We want to get more insight into how smokers feel about accepting help when they want to stop smoking, because this is still far less customary in the Netherlands compared to other countries. The aim is that we will then be able to respond to this situation better in campaigns.”