Publish date: 31 May 2022
By Eunice Sawo, Katerina Manginas, Joe Durham (Smokefree and Quality Improvement teams)
It’s World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) today (May 31), and this year’s campaign is focusing on the many ways in which tobacco threatens the environment we live in.
With the help of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other public health champions, they aim to raise public awareness on the lifecycle of a tobacco, from cultivation, production, distribution, and toxic waste generated. The day also aims to expose the tobacco industry’s effort to "greenwash" its reputation, and their efforts to make their products more appealing by advertising and marketing them as "environmentally friendly".
At West London NHS Trust, we are committed to maintaining a smokefree environment. We have a Smokefree Service available, with the team working hard to support our patients by providing pharmacotherapy and behavioural support, which in turn, reduces tobacco dependence with positive impact on the environment.
We believe promoting smoking cessation is the most effective thing we can do as healthcare professionals and clinicians, to improve health outcomes for our patients who smoke. It is also one of the most effective ways of triggering a quit attempt; by talking to patients about smoking we can not only reduce the huge burden of smoking on the NHS but reduce health inequalities and save lives.
Tobacco use, as we know, threatens the health of its users as it kills around 8 million people annually and is the single biggest cause of preventable death in the world. It remains an important public health issue as it is harmful to human health and its production, use and waste have devastating impact on the environment.
Our Smokefree Team are feeding into the aim of the NHS to be net zero by 2040, and the Trust’s Green Plan that launched in March this year. We will be using Quality Improvement (QI) methodology and tools to explore and measure the impact of our work in reducing the carbon footprint of the Trust.
In a year, in comparison to an individual consuming sugar, a smoker contributes almost 5 times more to water depletion, nearly 10 times more to fossil fuel depletion and 4 times more to climate change. It is predicted that by 2025 cigarette consumption may rise from current levels of 6 trillion - 9 trillion sticks which has significant further environmental consequences like deforestation, use of fossil fuels and dumping or leaking of waste products into the natural environments and cigarette-butt littering.