Providing smoking cessation for patients in hospitals will save lives and money
A major new report released today by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) calls for a radical change in the way the NHS treats smoking, by providing opt-out cessation services as a routine component of all hospital care.
The report, Hiding in plain sight: Treating tobacco dependency in the NHS, is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of smoking on the NHS and includes detailed recommendations for steps the NHS should take to address this impact. The report says that giving smokers the help they need to quit smoking while in hospital will save lives, improve quality of life as well as increasing life expectancy, and help to reduce the current £1 billion per year cost to the NHS of smoking by patients and staff.
It also argues that:
- Treating tobacco dependency is not just about preventing disease: in many cases it represents effective disease treatment. Clinicians working in all areas of medicine can improve their patients’ lives by helping them to quit
- Current models of delivering stop smoking services separately from mainstream NHS services, while successful in the past, may now not be the best approach because the patient has to seek help themselves
- Most health professionals receive little or no training in treating smokers
- The NHS does not collect data on smoking treatment delivery, or have a payment tariff for treating tobacco dependency
- Smoking treatment also tends to be squeezed out, even in the management of diseases caused by smoking, by other, less cost-effective intervention
The report calls for much greater action within the NHS to tackle smoking. Specifically that:
* Stop smoking interventions should be provided by the NHS to complement the services being delivered by local authorities
* Smokers should be referred to support on an opt-out basis
* Improvements should be made to the way smoking status is recorded in the NHS
* Training in smoking cessation should be more widespread among health professionals with improvements made to undergraduate curricula
* NHS facilities should continue to move to be smokefree,
* Stop smoking medications should be routinely prescribed and e-cigarettes should be available on hospital premises
Professor Sean Duffy, Clinical Lead for the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Cancer Alliance, welcomed the publication of the RCP report.
“As an Alliance, we have
already committed, through our Tobacco Control Board and our Tackling Lung
Cancer programme in Wakefield and Bradford, to supporting people receiving
treatment in the NHS for smoking-related illnesses, by using every patient
contact to offer help to quit. The contents and recommendations of the report
effectively endorse the approach we are taking to ensure as many people as
possible get the help to quit they need – including signposting from the NHS to
specialist smoking cessation services.”
Click here to download the report.
Click here to read the Royal College of Physicians media release.
