Unanswered questions over NHS health checks

We have been advocating respiratory health checks locally for the
last few years. These focus primarily on ever smokers over 40 years. The
key items obtained include occupations, smoking status, smoking pack years
and Forced expiratory lung volume checked against predicted value. The
smoking pack year calculator freely available on the web
www.smokingpackyears.com (11,000 web visits and calculations January 2011)
makes pack years recording easy to do in primary care sessions. The new
copd screeners (pulmolife and vitalograph) make obtaining predicted FEV1
simple.

Although the respiratory health check was designed to find
potential Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease patients for further
spirometry checks it also helps to target the patients most at risk of
smoking induced disease. Smoking is a known preventable cause of
numerous diseases from cancers, cardiovascular disease to some
inflammatory disorders eg thyrotoxicosis so I predict that recording a
pack year number on ever smokers will be as routine as blood pressure or
cholesterol recording in determining future disease risk!