NEWS: Making Conversations Count for All – Benefits of improving delivery of smoking cessation interventions for different socioeconomic groups

Today, Cancer Research UK has published a new report ‘Making Conversations Count for All: Benefits of improving delivery of smoking cessation interventions for different socioeconomic groups’ which includes modelling conducted by HealthLumen.

This builds on the previous 2020 report, which aimed to estimate the burden of active smoking related disease in the UK and quantify the health and economic impacts of improving the delivery within primary care over the next 20 years through three types of advice-based interventions.

This study builds on this previous work by looking at the impact of improving the delivery of these interventions on different socioeconomic groups, compared with current policy, between 2019-2039. By focusing on socioeconomic status, this study explores one component of deprivation to assess the impact of improving the delivery of these interventions on smoking related health inequalities and associated economic costs in the UK.

Key Findings

Smoking rates are projected to continue to decline across all socioeconomic groups.

But relative smoking inequalities are projected to widen without appropriate action. Consequently, lower socioeconomic groups will face a larger burden from smoking-related disease

Making improvements to stop smoking support is projected to see benefits across all socioeconomic groups

• All three of the advice-based intervention scenarios resulted in substantial additional declines in smoking prevalence across all socioeconomic groups

Gains across lower socioeconomic groups offer large opportunities to positively impact health and economic outcomes in the UK

• However, more research is needed to understand how to better meet the needs of deprived groups to encourage and support successful quit attempts through such interventions.

Full report

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