Providing information about e-cigarettes at lung health checks

The NHS has a long-term plan to reduce the number of people smoking in England to 5 per cent by 2030. To support this plan, it provides free e-cigarettes to smokers through the Swap to Stop (S2S) scheme.

One place this scheme is operating is at NHS lung health checks. These checks are offered to people aged 55 to 74 who smoke or have smoked, to look for signs of lung cancer. This is a unique opportunity to reach smokers at a time when they may be open to quitting.

Some people are not open to switching from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes because they hold the misconception that e-cigarettes are more harmful. As resources are limited in these settings, we need a simple way to inform smokers of the benefits of switching to e-cigarettes.

To do this, we have a video, posters and flyers explaining how to use e-cigarettes and their benefits and harms.

Project aims

In this project, we will test whether providing educational materials encourages more smokers to swap their conventional cigarettes for e-cigarettes. We will test these at lung health check sites in South West England.

We will measure:

• How many people accept e-cigarettes
• Of those who take an e-cigarette, how many people report using the e-cigarettes 30 days later
• How harmful people believe e-cigarettes are

We will compare these outcomes in weeks when information about e-cigarettes is provided with weeks when it is not.

We will also interview a sub-group of individuals who attended for a lung health check on weeks when the information about e-cigarettes was provided. We will ask them what they thought of the materials and about their experiences of being offered a free e-cigarette during their lung check.

What we hope to achieve

The results of this project will help us develop and test a final version of our educational materials aimed at encouraging smokers to swap to e-cigarettes.

We also plan to use what we have learned in this study to produce similar support for other health interventions that are being delivered in opportunistic settings (settings where the health intervention is not the main purpose of attending).