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NHS wastes millions on smokers who fail to quit
Sri Carmichael, Evening Standard22.04.08
The NHS faces accusations that it wasted millions of pounds trying to help smokers to quit.
More than £7.5 million was spent on smoking cessation schemes in London last year. But new figures show a wide variation in the number of people who gave up after taking a four-week intensive course, with a city-wide success rate of 50 per cent.
According to data from the NHS Information Centre, the worst performing primary care trust was Croydon, where only 27 per cent of smokers gave up. Lambeth and Kensington and Chelsea had success rates of 31 per cent and 33 per cent respectively.
Elsewhere, other NHS trusts helped more than 60 per cent of smokers to quit - and in Hounslow 74 per cent beat their addiction.
Vanessa Bourne of the Patients Association said: "It's unacceptable that good practice isn't evident everywhere."
Croydon PCT said it had doubled the size of its Stop Smoking team and Kensington and Chelsea said its team had also expanded. Lambeth said it planned to offer patients more contact time with stop-smoking staff.
Treatments offered at clinics include nicotine patches and gum and drugs such as Champix and Zyban.
Reader views (1)
What surprises me are the high success rates quoted. It doesn't make clear at which point smokers are considered to have quit but I suspect that it wasn't after a reasonable time period such as one year after stopping the course of NRT or drugs. How on earth can people quit by using NRT which continues to provide the addictive element of smoking ie nicotine? At the end of the course of NRT smokers will still want the nicotine but they aren't going to think "God, I'd love a nicotine patch"! People then just veer between smoking and NRT. No doubt when people return to the NRT clinic they again count that person to swell the numbers who they claim are trying to quit.
Furthermore, why is it that only the pharmaceutical industry's methods are promoted by the NHS? There are other methods such as hypnotherapy which is used elsewhere in the NHS. Could it be because the pharma companies are in bed with the tobacco control lobby? NRT products are worth billions of pounds a year to the pharma companies. I rather suspect that they developed NRT then used the lobby to market their product.
- Js, NE England
