NCSCT Updates Professional Guidance
The National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) has updated its vaping guide for health and social care professionals
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by Dave Cross
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The NCSCT produced its first guide back in 2014 and it was “a world-first review of the literature on use, effectiveness, and safety of e-cigarettes”.
The follow up, in 2016, leant heavily on the ground-breaking report issued by Public Health England, finding that vaping was “at least 95% safer than smoking”.
For this latest update, the NCSCT says: “In the last few years there has been a significant increase in research on e-cigarettes and a number of evidence reviews have been, and continue to be, regularly published.”
The NCSCT’s guide draws heavily on the 2022 evidence review by King’s College London for the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, recent annual surveys by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and the Smoking Toolkit Study.
“Of note,” the authors say, “is the 2022 Cochrane review of evidence suggesting that smokers are more likely to stop smoking for at least six months using nicotine-containing e-cigarettes compared to non-nicotine e-cigarettes and compared to NRT.”
“Significantly,” they continue, “in 2021 NICE recommended that smokers considering quitting should be advised that nicotine-containing e-cigarettes, when combined with behavioural support, are more likely to result in them successfully stopping smoking.”
The guide addresses some of the issues that continue to be raised about the use of e-cigarettes and addresses the common misconceptions that persist despite evidence disproving them.
Strikingly, the NCSCT makes a welcome call to change words currently being used: “The terms ‘electronic cigarette’ or ‘e-cigarette’ have never made much sense, largely because the devices are not cigarettes! Some early devices were designed to resemble cigarettes – but the newer, and far more effective devices, do not.
“It makes no sense to have a single term when there are so many different devices, each with their own design, technology, and delivery mechanisms; people also differ in how they use these devices.”
To shift how professionals see this route to quitting smoking, the NCSCT only refers to “vapes or vaping devices”, to the use of these devices as “vaping” and the people who use them as “vapers” – a very welcome step.
It is striking that the NCSCT feels the need to include a glossary of terms in its latest guide – especially given that vaping has been about for over a decade – but this serves to highlight the issue of entrenched opinions and worrying levels of ignorance within some health professionals.
Running to fifty pages, the document is packed full of sound advice and links to evidence sources.
References:
- The National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training - https://www.ncsct.co.uk/
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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