The Northamptonshire County Council internal employee wellbeing programme has been running for over two years and in that time has delivered events and initiatives that have registered in excess of 4,000 participants. So to align our programme with the Responsibility Deal was an easy choice for us.
Alongside the other deals we have signed up for, the decision to include H5 Smoking Cessation was a natural fit with our current delivery plans.
Based on guidance from NICE and ASH; smoking related short and long term ill-health, combined with increased smoking breaks can account for a considerable decline in employee productivity. Smoking can also lead to many destructive and life-changing conditions such as cancer and COPD and we of course would not wish this upon any of our staff. For these reasons, and also because we felt that quit clinics within the working day reduced any barriers to access, we decided to increase our delivery.
We already had some staff trained to be more aware of smoking related issues and to help guide smokers towards a quit attempt and through our Healthy Workplace Advisor, we had a trained Stop Smoking Advisor. Previous to the Responsibility Deal sign up we had already promoted the in-house quit opportunity to staff at events and through electronic comms. We had also promoted the benefits of stopping smoking on National Stop Smoking day in March. These promotions have resulted in various quit attempts being made by staff across the county.
With these current resources, we decided to increase our exposure of the opportunities for staff to make an in-house stop smoking quit. We backed up this in-house support by linking with the local Stop Smoking Service to ensure we provided accurate information on the quit clinics available in the local community. Our promotions included more frequent use of branded posters and leaflets from the NHS Smoking Resource Centre and electronic comms to include blogs and diaries from real life quitters.
We increased our dedicated periods of promotions to include Stoptober and New Year’s resolutions and linked smoking into associated initiatives such as our blood pressure clinics and cancer awareness road shows.
We have encouraged 17 staff members to make an in-house quit attempt with an above national average success rate of 65%.
“After several attempts to quit smoking over the last few years I thought Stoptober would give me the support I needed to quit for good. After speaking to Neill about my triggers for smoking and the reasons why I smoke, as well as finding other things to do instead of smoke a cigarette, my quit attempt hasn’t been as difficult as previous attempts. It’s been almost 2 weeks now ”.
