This week’s Community Champions information session, run by Public Health Merton, covered ‘Smoke Free Generation’. Kevin Wright (email hidden; JavaScript is required) is the council’s lead for this work.
He started with some basic facts: smoking cigarettes is harmful. 73,000 people in England died in 2023 of smoking-related causes. There was a fall in the number of people smoking until Covid when numbers stopped reducing. Kevin pointed out that smoking also harms those exposed to second-hand smoke and can lead to littering which harms the environment. A discarded cigarette filter can take up to 10 years to rot down and releases harmful chemicals that will linger much longer than 10 years.
The current government target is to achieve a ‘smoke free generation’ by restricting sales. In Merton, smokers are more likely to be white working class, SE Asian males, East European, those doing manual work, having poor mental health or diagnosed serious mental illness, long-term unemployed, residents in care homes and people living in social housing.
In Merton there are several ways you can get support to stop smoking, including specialist support for high-risk groups, a universal stop-smoking offer, a Swap to Stop scheme and a website that will pull together details of all the services (watch that space on www.merton.gov.uk). As well as the Public Health team, the Trading Standards, Social Housing and Town Centre management staff will be involved in this work, with the aim of creating ‘smoke free Mitcham’ or ‘smoke free Wimbledon’ for example.
All of One You Merton’s services are free and you can quite often find them at community events e.g. Cost of Living Crisis events, community health and wellbeing days, etc.
For those of you wishing to help with achieving ‘smoke free Merton’, you can undertake free training at Level 1 Stop Smoking – just email email hidden; JavaScript is required to enquire about when the next course will be taking place. This training is on-line. It will help build a network of champions who can raise awareness of support that is available in the borough, give people the tools and knowledge to refer people or to encourage them to self-refer and if you complete the training you get a certificate and badge/ribbon to show that you have done it!
Further training will be available on:
- Tuesday 3rd December, 2-3pm
- Thursday 19th December 10am -11am
- Wednesday 8th January 11am – 12 noon
- Tuesday 22nd January, 2pm – 3pm
You only need attend one of these sessions to complete the training. Use the email above to register on any of these courses.
The views expressed in this article are those of the Post author.
