Giving out free e-cigarette ‘starter packs’ in hospital emergency departments to people who smoke can help them quit, a study has concluded.
The trial, carried out by academics from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), offered advice, an e-cigarette or vape starter pack and referral to stop smoking services to people attending A&E for any reason, to help them to stop smoking.
Six months later almost one in four people given the starter packs said they had quit smoking. Those who received the vape packs but did not quit altogether were nevertheless more likely to have reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked, the study also found.
The trial, run by the Norwich Clinical Trials Unit at UEA, took place across six UK hospitals, and the research team now hope that the initiative will be rolled out to hospitals nationwide.
Dr Ian Pope, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School and an emergency physician, said: “Emergency departments in England see more than 24 million people each year of whom around a quarter are current smokers.
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“Attending the emergency department offers a valuable opportunity for people to be supported to quit smoking, which will improve their chances of recovery from whatever has brought them to hospital, and also prevent future illness.
“Smoking killed almost 75,000 people in the UK in 2019 and it is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the UK. Swapping to e-cigarettes could save thousands of lives. We believe that if this intervention was widely implemented it could result in more than 22,000 extra people quitting smoking each year,” Dr Pope added.
The study was co-designed and managed with the help of Norwich Clinical Trials Unit and ran over 30 months across six hospitals in England and Scotland. These were: the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the Royal London Hospital and Homerton University Hospital in London, Leicester Royal Infirmary, Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.
A total of 972 people who smoked agreed to take part, and were randomly assigned to receive either smoking advice, an e-cigarette or vape starter pack, referral to local stop smoking services, or just ‘usual care’, in other words written information about locally available stop smoking services.
Both groups of patients were asked if they were still smoking one, three and six months after they attended hospital. Those who reported quitting after six months were asked to undergo a carbon monoxide breath test.
Dr Pope said: “Those recruited were from neighbourhoods with high levels of deprivation and more people were unemployed or unable to work due to sickness or disability than the average.”
In total, 23.4% of the vape intervention group reported having quit smoking six months after they attended the emergency department. This compared with 12.9% of the ‘usual care’ group. This showed people were twice as likely to quit smoking having received the intervention than not, argued Dr Pope.
A total of 7.2% of those in the vape intervention group and 4.1% in the usual care group were confirmed to have quit smoking by undergoing a carbon monoxide breath test. “We also found that people who had received the vape intervention but did not quit smoking were more likely to reduce the number of cigarettes they smoked and more likely to have tried to quit compared to the usual care group,” said Dr Pope.
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“This shows that helping people quit smoking whilst they wait in the emergency department is effective. It also confirms that e-cigarettes are effective at helping people to quit smoking,” he added.
The results of the study have been published in the journal Emergency Medicine. The research team has also emphasised that, while its results were promising, A&E departments are not currently handing out free vapes.
