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Free vapes ‘not enough to snuff out smoking’
Ministers have rejected calls to raise the legal smoking age from 18, saying they will focus on helping smokers to switch to vaping instead.
Public health experts and charities have been calling for the legal age for buying cigarettes to be raised gradually, until tobacco smoking is phased out.
However, Neil O’Brien, a health minister and MP for Harborough, Leicestershire, ruled this out on Tuesday, saying that imposing blanket bans was at odds with government policy, which “emphasises personal responsibility”.
The government has set out a new package of measures, including a world first of offering free vape kits to help smokers to give up tobacco. Pregnant women will be offered up to £400 in gift cards to help them quit, with progress monitored by breath tests. The scheme will cost £45 million over two years.
O'Brien also said that the government would crack down on shops selling e-cigarettes to children — while offering free vapes to adults.
Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said the government had missed a key chance by not raising the legal age. She said: “To reach its target of a smoke-free England by 2030 and reduce pressures on the NHS it needs to go much further and faster.
“Since the Khan review was published [last June] 40,000 people’s lives have been changed forever with a cancer diagnosis caused by smoking. The government should follow the evidence by raising the age of sale on tobacco. Bold action is required to protect future generations from the suffering caused by smoking addiction.”
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said that the free vape kits and the voucher schemes for pregnant smokers were a welcome step but “nowhere near sufficient”.
Source: The Times, 11 April 2023
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Opinion: Vapes are only a part of the way to eradicate smoking
Writing for The Times, Professor Ann McNeill, a professor in tobacco addiction at King’s College London, discusses the ‘swap to stop’ scheme announced yesterday by the minister for primary care and public health, Neil O’Brien. This scheme will provide one million smokers with vapes to help them quit.
McNeill writes that, whilst there is good evidence that vapes are effective quitting aids, they are most effective when paired with behavioural support from trained practitioners. McNeill adds that stop-smoking services have seen a decade of disinvestment and that without extra funding there is a risk of “giving with one hand and taking away with the other”.
McNeill welcomes the commitments made during the announcement, such as financial incentives for pregnant women to quit smoking, launching a consultation on youth vaping and extra funding to enforce existing regulations on the sale of illicit vaping and tobacco products but adds there were missed opportunities. Notably, raising the sale of tobacco products to 21 and funding mass media campaigns would both be effective tools for reducing smoking.
Concluding, McNeill writes that unless more is done, over 500,000 more people may lose their lives as a result of smoking by 2030.
Source: The Times, 11 April 2023
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Crisis cash injections every winter ‘is no way to fund NHS’
Politicians have failed to hold down the NHS budget and are wasting money through inefficient “last-minute bungs” that make it impossible to break out of the present crisis, according to a think tank.
Ministers should accept that they cannot stop NHS spending from rising and let the health service plan budgets more effectively to keep people out of hospital, the King’s Fund argues in a report published today.
The NHS has regularly spent about £1 billion a year more than allocated, with the money sucked into panicked hospital firefighting at the expense of GPs and other services to keep people healthy, it concludes.
The attempt to constrain rises in the NHS budget over the past decade has led to wasteful annual bailouts that have raised pressure on hospitals and worsened a workforce crisis, it says. Letting health bosses use this cash better would allow more GP appointments and better services to keep people out of hospital.
The junior doctor strikes, the report suggests, are in part the result of a decade of failure to plan the NHS workforce properly as money was diverted from training into hospitals.
Rishi Sunak is among many senior Conservatives sceptical of NHS demands for more cash, emphasising the need to improve care and cut waste in a £160 billion budget. But the review, of the past two decades, finds that efforts to trim NHS budgets resulted in “stop-gap” measures such as raiding money allocated to infrastructure.
Sally Warren, director of policy at the King’s Fund said: “If that £750 million had been made available at the start of the year, or ideally in multi-year settlements for local government or primary care, they could have increased capacity in home care, for example. That could have prevented admissions and certainly speeded up discharge.”
She said: “You could transform care in a different way [with a sum that’s] really small in the overall NHS budget. So the key is how do you ring-fence support for prevention and investment, which means that in five years’ time your demand is better managed.”
Source: The Times, 12 April 2023
See also: The King's Fund- The rise and decline of the NHS in England 2000–20
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