Smoking claims over 80,000 lives per year and the NHS spends over £2.7 billion a year treating smoking-related illnesses.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has said that empowering people to stop smoking is the single most clinically and cost-effective preventative intervention that a healthcare professional can make to improve a patient’s quality of life and life expectancy. The NICE quality standard for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) recommends that patients with COPD who smoke are regularly encouraged to stop and are offered the full range of evidence-based stop smoking support.  

Offering stop smoking support has been a key role for pharmacy teams for a number of years. In 2004, the Government added a requirement to the community pharmacy contractual framework to provide opportunistic healthy lifestyle advice to people presenting prescriptions who smoke. Since then, there have been several white papers and plans from the Government intended to strengthen the evidence-based support community pharmacy teams can provide to those prepared to stop smoking. There is now huge scope to get involved, whether that’s providing a high-quality service when selling stop smoking products, setting up a stop smoking service, or further developing an existing stop smoking service.

Required learning

The National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) was established to help local stop smoking services in England to deliver effective evidence-based tobacco control programmes. 

The NCSCT training and assessment programme has been developed for experienced professionals providing stop smoking services who want to update or improve their knowledge and skills, as well as those who wish to start providing the service. It is likely that in the future all providers of commissioned stop smoking services will need to gain NCSCT certification in order to be commissioned. This programme can be accessed via CPPE.