Scottish NHS offers cash to get smokers to quit

The NHS in Scotland is offering smokers £12.50 (€13; $18) a week to quit cigarettes, in a two year pilot scheme that will test if financial incentives help.

The Quit4u project is being run in Dundee and targeted at people who live in the city’s deprived areas, where smoking rates are high and cessation levels low.

The money will be credited to an electronic card that can be redeemed in supermarkets for fresh food and groceries. The incentive will be paid for 12 weeks, and the people who take part will have to pass weekly breath tests for carbon monoxide at their local pharmacy to show that they are not smoking.

NHS Tayside, which is running the scheme in conjunction with the Scottish government, expects 1800 smokers to take part and predicts that half of them will quit successfully. The two year pilot will cost £540 000 to run, and if 900 people stop smoking, the average cost per person will work out at £600.

Scotland’s public health minister, Shona Robison, said that this will be money well spent if it can help people improve their health and reduce the cost to the health service of treating smoking related diseases. “The most important thing anyone can do to improve their health is to quit smoking. This is an innovative project, and I’ll be following the results with interest to see if lessons can be learnt for the rest of Scotland,” she said.

NHS Tayside has already found that financial incentives can work through a smaller scheme, Give it up for Baby, which encourages pregnant women to stop. Quit4u has been developed in partnership with the communities that it seeks to help. People were asked what they thought would provide the greatest encouragement to stop smoking, and the grocery incentive scheme was the most strongly supported.

NHS Tayside’s deputy director of public health, Paul Ballard, said, “Although current smoking cessation services are working well, we know we need to do more to tackle this. That’s why we were keen to work with local communities to find ways which they believe will help them make changes to their health behaviour.

“Our aim with this initiative is to get those people who would otherwise have carried on smoking and developed a heart condition or cancer, to quit. We believe that by offering this incentive we will be helping to deliver a change in the health of those who need it most.”