Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Smoking and Tobacco Alliance: July 2024 newsletter
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Smoking and Tobacco Alliance: July 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
- Working with schools to prevent smoking and vaping among children and young people
- Social housing and smoking
- Partner Spotlight
- Upcoming plans and events
1. 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.
Alliance partners in the news!
Work to tackle smoking by one of our Alliance partners was recently featured on the BBC. You can read about it here: Roles created to help smokers on Nottingham hospital grounds – BBC News. The news item highlighted the harms to others caused by secondhand smoke, and the stop smoking support available to hospital patients.
Zahida, smokefree lead at Nottingham University Hospital, was also interviewed for East Midlands Today! This story was picked up in the Action for Smoking and Health national bulletin on 20th June 2024.
It’s great to see one of our Alliance partner’s activities to reduce smoking featured on a national level, and we also picked it up on our social media channels, reposting the story to our Alliance accounts.
You can keep an eye on local activity by following our Alliance social media channels at
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/
If you’ve got any smoking-related campaigns planned in your organisation – do let us know, so we can help to amplify your messages too by reposting or responding to them from the Alliance social media accounts.
Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) grant funding for smoking cessation
We included information in our last newsletter about the additional £70million national investment for stop smoking services in England. The aim of this extra funding is to provide a comprehensive offer to help people stop smoking and to increase the number of smokers engaging with effective interventions to quit smoking.
Following the government guidance, in Nottinghamshire and Nottingham City, most of the funding will be used to expand the existing commissioned stop smoking services to increase capacity and resources to help people in our areas to quit smoking.
Our local stop smoking providers are expanding their services by:
– Building Capacity – recruiting new members of staff to provide more tailored and targeted support to help residents quit smoking
– Increasing resources – targeting smokers with other issues such as substance use, homelessness and mental health issues
– Building demand and promotion – increasing awareness and presence of the service through enhanced marketing and communication
– Delivery costs – purchasing additional pharmacotherapy to support the additional quits generated through an increase in capacity and resource
Both Your Health Notts and Thriving Nottingham have been working hard to recruit new staff and work with Alliance partners to increase their level of support and resource. This includes further developing support for inpatients in secondary care, people with substance use, mental health issues and homelessness.
Local Tobacco Declaration
The Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Smoking & Tobacco declaration has been refreshed. By signing the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire declaration on tobacco control, organisations can demonstrate their commitment to addressing tobacco-related issues and improving the health of their workforce and customers.
Why sign up?
A reduction in smoking prevalence year on year across the county would have significant benefits to the local community by:
- Improving people’s health and their quality of life, particularly in deprived wards
- Increasing household incomes when smokers quit
- Improving the life chances of young children by reducing their exposure to second hand smoke and reducing their chances of taking up smoking
- Reducing the costs of dealing with smoking related fires
- Reducing the costs of tobacco related littering
- Reducing serious and organised crime linked to the sale of illegal tobacco
For individual organisations who sign up, implementing the tobacco declaration can bring the following benefits:
- Improving health of staff and service users
- Saving money by reducing sickness absence
- Protecting your employees, customers and clients from exposure to second-hand smoke
- Increasing productivity
- Improving the environments around workspaces by reducing cigarette litter
- Reducing cleaning costs
- Sends a strong message to local communities that you are playing an active part in reducing the harm caused by tobacco.
How will this approach make a difference?
- Signing the declaration is the first step in demonstrating an organisation’s commitment to addressing tobacco related issues.
- Organisations who sign up can access training for their staff in having healthy conversations as well as receiving information on smoking and tobacco use, including details of local stop smoking services.
- Organisations are encouraged to develop their own action plans – a toolkit with further information is provided.
Organisations interested in signing the declaration or who would like more information can visit – Nottinghamshire County and Nottingham City declaration on tobacco control | Nottinghamshire County Council . City-based organisations can also email Swathi Krishnan Swathi.Krishnan@nottinghamcity.gov.uk ; County-based organisations should contact Jackie Waller jackie.waller@nottscc.gov.uk.
2. Working with schools to prevent vaping and smoking among children and young people
We’ve developed some new materials aimed at young people and adults who work with them. We now have some new resources about the harms of vaping, designed for an audience of young people. Originally developed by Smokefree Sheffield, with support from ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), these have been adapted for our local areas.
The set of resources includes:
- Two posters aimed at young people (pictured) – for display in schools and community venues
- A parents’ leaflet, with tips for having conversations with young people about vaping
- An animation, for sharing with young people to promote discussion. Do take time to have a look at this – it’s short, but contains important key messages
- Teacher presentation slides for use in the classroom
If you’d like copies of the posters for display in your premises, please contact swathi.krishnan@nottinghamcity.gov.uk or kay.massingham@nottscc.gov.uk.
We’re also developing online resource packs for schools to help them address vaping amongst young people. These contain factual information, template policies, advice for dealing with vaping incidents, links to teaching resources, promotional materials, and information for sharing with children and young people, and with parents / carers. You can look at the live County version here. If you have any comments on this, let us know using the feedback form within the resource pack. The City version will be available soon – at the time of writing, still in construction.
3. Work with social housing providers and the Fire Service to reduce smoking in people’s homes
Did you know that around 1 in 3 social housing residents smoke, compared to 1 in 10 residents who own their home and 1 in 8 in the general adult population?
People who live in social housing are just as likely to want to stop smoking as the general population, but it’s harder for them to quit because they tend to be more addicted and live in a more pro-smoking environment. Social housing staff have a unique opportunity to interact with this group. The Fire Service also shares an interest in getting people to stop smoking in their homes, as smoking is a big cause of house fires in the UK.
We recently delivered a joint training session to give front-line workers the confidence and tools to start conversations about smoking with tenants, and signpost them to local stop smoking services. 30 people, from local authority housing departments, housing associations and the Fire Service, attended the online session.
Feedback showed that participants valued the training and found the session useful. Participants said they felt more confident to start conversations about smoking and would definitely signpost residents to local services.
If you’d like to know more about local social housing-focused work, please contact kay.massingham@nottscc.gov.uk.
4. Partner Spotlight: Environmental health and Safer Business Team, Nottingham City Council
The Safer Business Team enforces smoke free legislation within the City, and can serve fixed penalty notices on businesses or individuals found to be smoking in premises, or prosecute those who repeatedly or flagrantly breach the law.
They also try to work with businesses where non-compliance is found, such as advising them to prevent employees smoking during working hours, restricting the use of e-cigarettes or not allowing illegal tobacco to be sold on their premises.
Here’s a recent example of their brilliant work – Nottingham social club fined for smoking ban breach – BBC News.
5. Upcoming plans and events
We’re starting to think about our delivery plan for the next three years, which will include looking at the findings from our behavioural insights research and designing activities in response.
We’re also piloting a smokefree toolkit approach to support organisations in the local area to become smokefree. As part of this, we have sent a new checklist to a small number of organisations for testing. Depending on the feedback, we hope to tell you more about this piece of work in the next newsletter. If you’re interested in joining the testing group, please contact Swathi.Krishnan@nottinghamcity.gov.uk.
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 all our partners’ efforts to reduce smoking in our area. If you’re planning any campaigns or activities focused on tobacco, please get in touch.