A controversial scheme in which smokers are paid public cash to quit their habit could be introduced to deprived areas of Perth and Blairgowrie.
The Quit4U initiative has been tried in Dundee with mixed results but NHS Tayside is keen to target Perth smokers from October.
The Dundee scheme sees participants paid £12.50 a week as long as they can prove they have stopped smoking.
A total of 450 “at risk” people will be targeted in the Perth pilot, each of whom would be tested weekly.
The suggestion will be put to Tuesday’s meeting of the Perth and Kinross Community Health Partnership (CHP) Committee by smoking cessation co-ordinator Judy Robertson and senior health promotion officer Felicity Snowsill.
In a joint paper, they state targeting smokers will “impact on the rates of cardiovascular disease, cancers and stroke.”
They state, “It is increasingly recognised that traditional approaches to health promotion, based around the medical model, are unlikely to deliver the performance required in terms of behaviour change.
“Successful schemes that demonstrate the ability to engage with hard-to-reach groups use the principles of social marketing, either implicitly or explicitly, within their design.
“This paper proposes that NHS Tayside with the Community Planning Partnership in Perth and Kinross delivers a smoking cessation incentive scheme to the population based in areas of high social disadvantage in north Perth initially, with a view to rolling out to Rattray.
“The incentive scheme will be delivered using social marketing principles and will establish the systems and infrastructure required to deliver a generic health promoting incentive scheme.”Deprived areasThere are an estimated 23,000 adult smokers in Perth and Kinross 21.8% of the population but the figure leaps up in the deprived areas being targeted, Letham (32.9%), Muirton (32.3%), Tulloch (34.5%) and Rattray (26.7%).
Figures for 2006 showed 3% of 13-year-olds and 15% of 15-year-olds had the habit, while almost a quarter of pregnant woman smoke in Perth and Kinross.
Again, these figures rise according to relative affluence of the area.
The estimated cost of the six-month pilot would be over £50,000 including £35,000 to cover the incentive payments and £8500 for extra staff hours.
The Dundee Quit4U scheme was given £530,000 over two years with a projected quit rate of 35% but fewer than one in 10 were known to have kicked the habit for good.
Of over 3000 participants in 2008, almost a third were known to have returned to smoking.
NHS Tayside admitted in March it expects to miss its quitters target by a quarter.
It had hoped to persuade 6000 of the Tayside area’s 80,000 smokers to give up their habit by March next year.
Photo used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user Valentin Ottone.