SMOKING CESSATION
A SMOKELESS SCOTLAND?
HERE IS NO DOUBT THAT SMOKING, AND THE DISEASES ASSOCIATED WITH IT, ARE SOME OF THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS FACED BY THE UK HEALTHCARE SYSTEM.
about the dangers associated with this activity, and how to break the habit, making Scottish population healthier on the whole, and ultimately reducing healthcare expenditure across the country.
A
It isn’t groundbreaking knowledge that smoking is a dangerous habit to partake in – indeed, smoking tobacco has been identifi ed as one of the leading causes of preventable deaths across the globe. It’s important to note that this doesn’t just include the smoking of cigarettes, but also includes cigars, pipes and other forms
40 - SCOTTISH PHARMACIST
s always, Scotland’s pharmacists are in a prime position to provide advice to smokers, both
of smoking tobacco. If we focus on the UK as a whole, we can see that smoking is related to approximately 100,000 deaths per year, with a large number of these deaths being caused by conditions such as heart disease, circulatory problems, dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in addition to the large array of cancers which are normally associated with smoking, and have obvious associated costs to the NSH1
. It’s also
important to remember that the risks of smoking are not just over the long term – these products contain vast numbers of toxic chemicals which can exert various negative effects on the human physiology in a short space of time, often exacerbating other
comorbidities. When this is considered alongside the hugely addictive nature of tobacco smoking due to nicotine content, it’s easy to understand how smoking can negatively affect a smoker’s health. When you factor in further issues such as the price of smoking, it’s pretty obvious that monetary health of smokers can also be affected!
SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE?
The information in the paragraph above isn’t going to be new to you, and as a result, you might think that the number of people smoking in the UK is on the decline. In fact, the opposite is true, despite huge emphasis being placed on various
programmes to both educate and assist the public in breaking their smoking habits.
Latest fi gures indicate that the total number of cigarette smokers in the UK is approximately 9.5 million, and these fi gures don’t include the other types of tobacco mentioned previously in this article. As with other similar activities and health issues, geography and socioeconomics play a part in smoking statistics – for example, 19.8% of the population of Wales are smokers, 18.4% of England’s population smoke, and Northern Ireland has a smoking prevalence of 18.7%. However, 21.1% of the population of Scotland are regularly smoking cigarettes, making Scotland
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