Stoptober and the “eradication” of smoking

Stoptober 2018, Public Health England’s mass quit smoking campaign, is launched today.

Readers may recall that last year I had a long battle with PHE to find out how many smokers had signed up to Stoptober 2016.

See: Stoptober and the mystery of the missing evaluation.

Eventually, after a lot of prodding (including a Freedom of Information request), PHE told us:

We are releasing an evaluation document of Stoptober 2016 during Stoptober 2017; this will be available on the PHE website ... The original publication date was delayed.

Incredibly the four-page document was posted online on October 26, 2017, a full twelve months after the campaign it was evaluating finished.

See: At last! The Stoptober 2016 campaign evaluation report.

My suspicion is that had Forest not pursued the matter the report would not have been published at all.

This year we decided to take a softly softly approach and see if PHE would publish an evaluation report for Stoptober 2017 without being nagged to do so.

So far I’ve seen nothing to suggest they will, although they may be following a similar schedule for the 2016 report (ie publication towards the end of Stoptober 2018).

It does strike me as odd though that an evaluation report for a campaign conducted the previous year should appear only at the conclusion of the following campaign.

After all, you might think they would want to learn from the previous campaign and plan accordingly.

Anyway, after a series of C and D-list ‘celebrities’, the person PHE has chosen to front Stoptober 2018 is TV presenter Jeremy Kyle who has quit smoking after 35 years and is currently vaping.

See: Jeremy Kyle calls on smokers to quit smoking during Stoptober (ITV News)

As it happens, I don’t have a major problem with Stoptober. Indeed, aside from the evaluation issue, it seems less preachy that most anti-smoking campaigns.

I do however question its ‘success’ which seems to be measured in terms of the annual decline in the national smoking rate - the reasons for which are many and varied.

Indeed, I’d suggest that the main beneficiaries of Stoptober are not smokers who want to quit but the PR agencies employed at great expense to promote it.

Update: Channel 5 News contacted Forest yesterday to see if someone was available today for a quick interview about the campaign.

Unfortunately I’m in Birmingham all day today and unable to go to the ITN studios in London, which is their preferred location.

I will however be on the Matthew Wright Show (Talk Radio) at 3.30 discussing PHE’s claim that smoking could be “eradicated” in England by 2030.