Health drive aims to get 19,000 off cigarettes by 2010

PREGNANT women and youngsters will be targeted in a new drive aimed at helping 19,000 smokers in the Lothians quit by 2010.

NHS Lothian plans to spend £910,000 on stop-smoking teams and initiatives following an award of £8 million to health boards made by the Scottish Government to improve people's quality of life.

The Government has set the authority targets to reduce the proportion of over-16s who smoke to 22 per cent from 25 per cent, and the percentage of women who smoke during pregnancy from 23 in 2006 to 15 by 2010.

Anti-smoking group Ash Scotland believes the real figure for the number of women who smoke is higher than official figures, as many women are too ashamed to admit to their doctors or health advisers they are continuing with the habit.

ASH Scotland chief executive Sheila Duffy said: "The Scottish Government has set health boards challenging targets to meet by 2010, alongside standstill funding for the next three years, and it is really important that boards dedicate resources to tackling smoking.

"Seventy per cent of smokers say they want to quit, so cessation services are vital and must remain a public health priority.

"For smokers who succeed in quitting, there are both immediate and long-term health benefits. Cessation support is also very cost-effective."

Dr Alison McCallum, director of public health and health policy at NHS Lothian, said: "We will be using this funding to build on approaches with proven benefits in helping people to stop smoking.

"These include extending our already successful work with pregnant women, and we have just appointed two new stop smoking advisers to work within hospitals across Lothian."

As well as the money to help people stop smoking, £600,000 of Scottish Government money goes towards sexual health programmes in the Lothians, focusing on sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies among young people.

And £500,000 will go towards narrowing the health inequalities gap between those in affluent areas and those in deprived parts of the region.

The number of gay and bisexual men asking to be tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases has almost trebled in the Lothians.

Recently released figures revealed that 388 men attended a specialist clinic at Lauriston Place in 2006 to 2007, compared with only 132 two years previously.

The latest figures show there were 89 new HIV patients in the Lothians in the first nine months of 2007, compared with 99 in the whole of 2006. But it is feared an estimated 40 per cent of gay or bisexual men in the region with HIV do not know they have it.

Meanwhile, both Ash Scotland and the British Heart Foundation have highlighted health and disease levels being markedly worse in the more deprived parts of the Lothians. Heart disease death rates are falling throughout Scotland's most deprived areas except in the Lothians.

A total of 211 people died in the poorest parts of the Lothians from coronary heart problems between 2004 and 2006, one more than in 2003 to 2005.

The death rate also rose slightly to 112.8 per 100,000 people, although this was still below the Scottish average.

Almost half of residents in some of Edinburgh's most deprived areas, such as Greendykes and Niddrie Mains, are addicted to cigarettes, compared with fewer than one in ten elsewhere in the city.

• www.nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk
• www.scotland.gov.uk