Helping people to give up tobacco using e-cigarettes

Greater Manchester Health and Social Partnership (GMHSP, 2017), in their recent ‘Marking Smoking History: A Tobacco Free Greater Manchester’ – 2017-2021 has set an ambitious strategy to reduce smoking by a third by the end of 2020, reducing overall adult smoking prevalence to 13%.  This involves 115,000 current adult smokers quitting by 2020.  See – http://www.gmhsc.org.uk/assets/Tobacco-Free-Greater-Manchester-Strategy.pdf. This latest strategy has been put in place because there are approximately 4,500 smoking attributable deaths a year in Greater Manchester, amongst those aged over 35, which equates to almost 13 people dying prematurely every day.  

As part of comprehensive local action on smoking, the University of Salford has recently partnered with Salford City Council and Trafford Council to evaluate their interventions to encourage people to stop smoking using e-cigarettes, at baseline and 12 months.  Both projects have provided free e-cigarette starter-packs, as well as behaviour support to help smokers, particularly those in the most deprived areas, to quit smoking.  Research is still ongoing; however, to date nearly 2,000 smokers have taken part in the interventions and early findings have been promising, with service users engaging with the scheme, and reducing their cigarette consumption, or quitting cigarettes altogether.

Our work with Salford City Council on the use of e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking has been mentioned in the Prevention Green Paper consultation document ‘Advancing our health: prevention in the 2020s’ – https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/advancing-our-health-prevention-in-the-2020s/advancing-our-health-prevention-in-the-2020s-consultation-document

Funder: Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership and Trafford Council

Team: Dr Margaret Coffey, Dr A.M. Cooper-Ryan, L. Houston, K. Thompson and Professor Penny Cook