Statistics on NHS Stop Smoking Services in England - April 2020 to March 2021

NHS Stop Smoking Services were first set up in 1999/2000 with the aim of reducing health inequalities and improving health among local populations.

Services were rolled out across England from 2000/01 and provide free, tailored support to all smokers wishing to stop by offering a combination of recommended stop smoking pharmacotherapies and behavioural support.

This report presents statistics from Stop Smoking Services in England for the period April 2020 to March 2021 and is supplemented by excel tables, and CSV data files.

It supersedes the provisional results previously published for quarters 1, 2 and 3 in 2020/21.

Information is presented at national, regional and local authority (LA) level including some time series data for the last 10 years.  Information is also shown by age, gender and ethnicity.

A number of LAs submitted incomplete data. More information is available in table 5.3 of the accompanying Statistics on NHS Stop Smoking Services April 2020 to March 2021 tables.

No estimation has been made for missing data and therefore national and regional totals which appear in this report will be underestimates.

A self-reported quitter is defined as a treated smoker who reports not smoking for at least days 15-28 of a quit attempt and is followed up 28 days from their quit date. Further to this, a self-reported quitter is considered to be CO-verified if their CO reading is assessed 28 days from their quit date and is less than 10ppm. For further details, please refer to the accompanying appendices.

In 2020/21, 178,815 people accessed NHS Stop Smoking Services and set a quit date.

In the same period,  there were 105,403 self-reported quitters. Of these, 3,115 were CO-verified.

The self-reported quit rate was 59%. This is significantly higher than recent years: since 2010/11 the rate has ranged between 49% and 52%.

2% of those setting a quit date were CO validated. This is significantly lower than recent years: since 2010/11 the rate has ranged between 32% and 37%.