The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest threats the world has ever faced, and it kills 8 million people a year worldwide. In 2019, a national ambition was set for England to become smoke-free by 2030.
Essex has also matched this ambition by signing the Local Government Declaration on Tobacco Control on October 2023, pledging to act at a local level to:
Raise the profile on the harms of tobacco, reduce the local prevalence of tobacco smoking, reduce inequalities at a local level, partner with local communities to tackle the causes and impact of tobacco use, not accepting any partnership with the tobacco industry and publicly join the Smokefree Action Coalition.
ECC Public Health is also working with public health colleagues in our city, district, and borough authorities to commission stop smoking services to help more people access support. But we need to reach the right people! We need to find out who are more likely to take up smoking, why, and what is the best way to reach them.
But that’s not all!
Smoking is also a leading cause of health inequality and twice as likely in deprived areas. Some of the strategies to reduce smoking are campaigns, increasing taxation, banning advertisements, and packaging with warning labels. Despite these efforts, smoking remains stubbornly high in disadvantaged areas and among people with low incomes. Nationally, a smoker spends on average £2,338 on tobacco products per year, which further traps people in a cycle of poverty and deprivation.
There is no magical key to unlock all these problems! The reality requires a lot of data and research to understand where the populations with the greatest smoking prevalence live, who they are, what do they need, and how do they get support. A systematic way we try to do this is by a needs assessment.
Our tobacco needs assessment summarises the data on smoking prevalence, the impact of smoking across the life-course, smoking related inequalities and information on local stop smoking services. We have taken an intersectional approach to inequalities and built profiles at district level. We have also gone beyond the traditional approach to look at the damage to the environment caused by the tobacco industry.
But for all the questions we have answered, we are also coming up with more unanswered questions, and gaps in data. We plan to use our needs assessment as a foundation to create a tobacco strategy, gather community insight, and follow up with supplementary reports focusing on smoking in specific populations.
Not only do we want smokers to get support, we also to want to leverage strategic partnerships to make tobacco everyone’s business. We want to support more vulnerable people, change the population perceptions on smoking, and create more smoke-free workplaces and outdoor spaces.
We have a long road ahead of us. But as the saying goes, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. In our case, it’s the tobacco needs assessment.
Please visit Essex Open data to read the full tobacco needs assessment report.
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