Patients who want to stop smoking feel comfortable about asking for advice
from pharmacists and there are now new ways for pharmacists to help them, said
Dr DAWN MILNER (Department of Health tobacco unit).
Giving up smoking was hard to do and people needed help to stop. It was important
to offer a package of care to smokers who wished to stop and funding had been
given to health action zones to set up specialist and intermediate smoking cessation
services.
Specialist services ran as clinics, with smokers attending for group therapy
and other intensive support. Intermediate services were usually on a one-to-one
basis, with weekly support for the first four weeks. Intermediate services used
trained practitioners in a variety of settings, which could include community
pharmacies.
Pilot schemes, in which vouchers for one-week’s free nicotine replacement
therapy (NRT) were given out, had been set up and nearly 6,000 out of a total
of 14,600 people had given up smoking at the four-week stage of these programmes.
It had been proposed that NRT should be made available on prescription and a
consultation exercise was under way to remove it from the blacklist. If this
was successful, NRT might be available on prescription early next year. It was
vital that smokers were encouraged to give up the habit, as people who stopped
before the age of 35 ended up with the same risk of lung cancer as those who
had never smoked.
Over the 100-year period between 1950 and 2050, tobacco was likely to kill 520
million people, unless all current smokers stopped now. Smoking caused many
diseases, including 35 per cent of all cancers, 90 per cent of lung cancers
and 83 per cent of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The total cost of treating smokers for their tobacco-related illnesses was between
£1.4 and 1.7bn. However, stopping smoking before reaching middle age could
avert 90 per cent of risk attributable to cancer.