TOBACCO POLICY SPECIAL
IN
a recent survey of 500 smokers, 67% had never heard of COPD (chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease), and only 16% knew without prompting it was linked to breathing problems.
That is perhaps not surprising, as according to Fresh, the north east’s tobacco control programme, far too many smokers assume that breathing trou- ble is just a ‘normal’ part of smoking cigarettes, and so do not seek help from their GP until the disease reaches its later stages.
To combat this, Fresh and the British Lung Foun- dation have launched a campaign called ‘Every breath’, with the message: ‘every cigarette is doing you damage’.
Getting heard
The organisation, which won the Chief Medical Offi cer’s Gold Medal for Public Health in 2009, argues that factual and sometimes shocking health messages should once again be at the forefront of work to reduce smoking. It is pushing this message through mass media advertising.
We asked Fresh’s director, Ailsa Rutter, which pub- lic health messages have been found to be most ef- fective in tackling smoking.
She explained: “There’s a huge evidence base on the role of anti-smoking campaigns and we’ve got 30 years of really good experience around this now. My big, top-line message is that mass media ad- vertising on smoking, when done well, absolutely works. Probably the most successful concerted mass media campaign on smoking was the Nation- al Tobacco Campaign from Australia, which I was part of back in the late 1990s.
“Certainly mass media isn’t the magic answer on its own – it needs to be part of a broader programme. This is really being backed up by the World Health Organisation now, and the fantastic ‘Monograph 19’ from the National Cancer Institute in Ameri- ca, which summarises the key principles for what makes effective mass media campaigns around smoking.”
Uncomfortable is good
NHE speaks to Ailsa Rutter, director of Fresh – which was the UK’s fi rst dedicated regional programme for tobacco control – about public health messaging and smoking
She continued: “You need to make it personally rel- evant to the person so they can identify with it: ‘this could be me’. It needs to elicit negative emotions and negative arousal and indeed make people feel uncomfortable. But you also need to give that sense of ‘there is help, so you can overcome this’.
“We talk about this being the ‘push-pull’ strategy; it motivates people and pushes them to want to quit and the pull is that there is support to stop – so something like ‘Every breath’ is to motivate people around the really hard-hitting messages on COPD, but to say ‘you can do it – other people have stopped and we have got the stop smoking services here ready and waiting to help you’.
20 | national health executive Nov/Dec 11
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100