Welcome to our newsletter for Spring! We’re hoping 2024 will be just as busy as 2023. In the first three months of this year, we’ve been working together towards our Alliance goal of eliminating smoking and tobacco-related harm and creating a smokefree generation for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. This newsletter highlights some recent activities, such as the social media campaigns we ran during March to support No Smoking Day, and the plans we’ve made to use additional stop smoking resources.
Recently, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill was introduced before Parliament to help protect future generations from the harmful impacts of smoking. If passed, this legislation will ensure that children turning 15 this year (2024) or younger will never be legally sold cigarettes or other tobacco products, even after they turn 18. This is a significant move towards creating a smokefree generation and the debates in parliament will offer extra opportunities to raise awareness of the harms of tobacco and promote our stop smoking services locally.
It is an exciting time for us to be working together and collectively aiming to reduce smoking rates in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. Thanks once again for your support and input, which is very much appreciated.
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Smoking and Tobacco Alliance: April 2024 newsletter
The Alliance has a clear, shared ambition to see smoking amongst adults reduced to 5% or lower by 2035 across Nottinghamshire and Nottingham City.
Further to this, we want to make the harms of smoking a thing of the past for our next generation such that all of those born in 2022 are still non-smokers by their 18th birthday in 2040.
In this newsletter:
- Programme Updates
- New Integrated Wellbeing Service in the city
- New promotional resources aimed at preventing smoking and vaping among young people
- Real Stories
- Partner Spotlight
- Upcoming plans and events
Programme Updates
Through our work as an Alliance, we continue to raise the profile of stop smoking services, available support and organisations that work hard to tackle the harms of tobacco. Our goal is to have conversations about why people smoke in the city and county, how people feel about smoking in their communities and how we can support people to quit.
Our social media channels were launched in October 2023. Since then, across all four platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram – we have had at least 1107 interactions with our posts and now have more than 115 followers.
If you haven’t yet followed our social accounts, the links are below – feel free to share and like our posts! The more people who follow and interact with us, the more the accounts will be shown to others on the platforms, so your support really helps to get the message out.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/smokefreenn
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/97399935/admin/feed/posts/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smokefreefuturesnn/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smokefreefuturesnn/
National No Smoking Day – 13th March and our March social media campaign: Reflecting on 40 years of tobacco control
No Smoking Day 2024 marked the 40th anniversary of No Smoking Day in England. For the whole of March, the Alliance used this opportunity to reflect on the last 4 decades of tobacco control in our social media channels. A summary is shown below:
As part of the month’s campaign, we published this video of local public health expert and former tobacco control advisor Liz Pierce reflecting on her work when stop smoking services were first set up back in 2000 – No Smoking Day (youtube.com).
As well as signposting readers to support available, both nationally through the NHS and locally through our community stop smoking services, we also highlighted the importance of smokefree spaces in supporting people who are trying to give up smoking, encouraged reporting of illegal and underage tobacco sales, and promoted signing the tobacco declaration to local organisations.
Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) grant funding for smoking cessation
The Government is introducing changes to create the first ever Smokefree Generation. The proposed changes will protect future generations from starting smoking, and effectively phase out smoking for good.
Legislation has been proposed so that children turning 15 this year (2024) or younger will never be legally sold cigarettes or other tobacco products, even after they turn 18.
The changes also include additional support for smokers who are trying to quit, and measures to reduce the appeal of vapes to children and young people.
To support existing smokers to quit, the government is more than doubling the budget for stop smoking services, investing an additional £70 million per year (to a total of £138 million), aiming to support around 360,000 people to quit each year.
Both city and county are receiving extra funding of £545,215 and £1,039,463 respectively per annum for the next 5 years. We aim to use this funding to help more people stop smoking, by:
- increasing promotion of services to raise awareness of stop smoking services
- stimulating more quit attempts by providing more smokers with advice and swift support linking smokers to the most effective interventions to quit
- boosting existing behavioural support schemes designed to encourage smokers to quit
- expanding support for target groups / areas, focusing on where there are high levels of smoking
- building capacity in local areas to respond to increased demand
- strengthening partnerships in local healthcare systems.
We will keep you updated as the implementation of the funding starts.
New Integrated Wellbeing Service in the city
Thriving Nottingham is now live in Nottingham city. A new, free health and wellbeing service, funded by Nottingham City Council and developed by Thrive Tribe, is now here to revolutionize health support for residents in Nottingham.
🔗 Streamlined support. Simplifying access for residents, the service consolidates diverse health and wellbeing provisions into one central platform.
💪 Diverse offerings (in-person and virtual provision). Supporting adults, children and families with weight management using programmes by gloji, MAN v FAT and Slimming World, as well as offering support with smoking cessation, community-based physical activity options and personalised 1-to-1 health coaching.
Lucy Hubber, Director of Public Health at Nottingham City Council, said:
“People in Nottingham have poorer health outcomes than in other similar areas. We are therefore thrilled to partner with Thrive Tribe to bring to life our vision of a new health and wellbeing offer for Nottingham residents from April 2024. The new service, Thriving Nottingham, will consider the physical, mental, social, and emotional aspects of health and wellbeing. This service will help meet the diverse needs of our communities and recognise that health behaviours are complex and rarely occur in isolation.
We look forward to working with Thrive Tribe to ensure Thriving Nottingham becomes a trusted and well-used service for all of our communities and a service that improves the lives of all of Nottingham City residents.”
To know more, please visit – Thriving Nottingham | Helping you to live well and feel great
New promotional resources – preventing vaping and smoking among children and young people
We’ve created some posters to encourage reporting of underage sales – for both tobacco products and vapes. Restricting underage sales helps to prevent vaping and smoking by young people, as it reduces their access to the products. These posters are intended to encourage adults to report to Trading Standards when they become aware of places selling vapes and/ or tobacco products to people who are under 18. The vaping poster also includes some information on how to recognise unregulated vapes when you see them for sale.
As the posters are promoting reporting by adults, they are intended for use in staff or office areas, rather than areas primarily used by young people.
If you’d like copies of these posters for display in your premises, to encourage reporting by your staff, please contact Swathi swathi.krishnan@nottinghamcity.gov.uk or Kay kay.massingham@nottscc.gov.uk.
Real Stories
Here is a patient quit story from Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust:
Referred to the service in November 2023, the patient had been smoking since the age of 16 with a consumption rate of 20 cigarettes per day. Previous attempts with nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs), particularly patches had left her dissatisfied and expressed to try e-cigarettes in order to gradually reduce the number of cigarettes.
By January 2024, the cigarette consumption reduced to 6 cigarettes daily and was down to only 1-2 cigarettes a day by the end of the month. In February she successfully quit smoking altogether, including vaping.
Patient feedback admitted that the process of quitting had been more challenging that anticipated but helped her mental health significantly.
This shows the importance of harm reduction and the benefits of quitting the habit.
If you have any other case studies, feel free to drop us a line at swathi.krishnan@nottinghamcity.gov.uk and kay.massingham@nottscc.gov.uk.
Partner Spotlight: Quarrydale Academy’s smoking prevention work with 11–15-year-olds
Secondary schools in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire can access INTENT, a free, evidence-based smoking and vaping prevention programme aimed at 11–15-year-olds who have never smoked. Designed to be delivered by teachers as part of the PSHE curriculum, the content includes interactive, age-appropriate activities providing information on tobacco, vaping, and reasons not to smoke or vape, followed by creation of unique “Personal Plans” about how to refuse offers of cigarettes or vapes.
The Quarrydale Academy in Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, has provided some feedback on the Intent programme.
A Year 7 student said: “I felt that the information given and how it was given was very good. It wasn’t just about learning, but also ways in which the knowledge, information and strategies could be used in other areas of life”.
One of the Quarrydale teachers that delivered INTENT said: “The resources were easy to use and the information that was to be shared was clear and well explained. This gave me confidence to deliver the sessions and they were organised in a way that staff and students found interesting – Staff and students got a lot from this, and it also helped develop relationships further”.
Steven Cooper, Assistant Head Teacher and Designated Safeguarding Lead at Quarrydale said: “Intent was organised and explained very well initially by the team, support for the website and use of resources was excellent and contact and communication to support the use of this in school has been great, and available at any point”.
Find out more about the Intent programme at INTENT | smoking prevention programme | Evidence to Impact.
Upcoming plans and events
Going forward we’ll continue to spread the importance of quitting and signposting Nottingham and Nottinghamshire residents to the right support. We’ll also continue to educate people on the harms of tobacco.
We want to shine a light on our partners’ efforts to reduce smoking in our area. If you’re planning any campaigns or activities focused on tobacco, please get in touch.
We’ve been focusing on several key issues, including illegal tobacco (and the need to stamp it out), underage sales, and the benefits of creating smokefree spaces. Feel free to get in touch if you have any ideas for future activities around any of these issues.
For our work on smokefree spaces and policy, we will shortly be consulting partners on their current activities and setting up a Delivery Group to take forward work on this theme – as we already have in place for the other Alliance themes. If your organisation would be interested to participate, please contact – swathi.krishnan@nottinghamcity.gov.uk and kay.massingham@nottscc.gov.uk.
