NHS told to create vaping lounges in hospitals
HOSPITALS SHOULD sell e-cigarettes to patients and switch smoking shelters to vaping lounges, health officials have said.
Patients should be allowed to vape in private rooms and purchase e-cigarette devices in hospital shops, Public Health England (PHE) said.
Meanwhile, Government officials should help manufacturers licence e-cigarettes as medical quitting aids.
Such a move would allow GPs to prescribe the devices to their patients who are trying to stop smoking.
The calls come after PHE published its latest independent review into the evidence surrounding e-cigarettes.
Experts concluded that vaping only poses a small fraction of the risks of smoking. E-cigarettes could be contributing to 20,000 new quits each year, they estimated.
But the number of people using the products has “plateaued” and now stands at just under three million people in the UK, according to the review, which was conducted by experts from King’s College London and the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, the University of Stirling and Cancer Research UK.
Researchers found that thousands of smokers “incorrectly” believe that vaping is as harmful as smoking and two in five smokers had not even tried an e-cigarette.
In a linked editorial, published in experts from PHE said: “Although not without risk, the overall risk of harm is estimated at less than five per cent of that from smoking tobacco; the risk of cancer has been calculated to be less than one per cent.”
Following the review, PHE has made a number of recommendations about e-cigarettes, including a call for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to support manufacturers to license the products as medical quit aids so they can be made available on the NHS; encouraging any smoker to switch to using e-cigarettes, and calling on NHS trusts to be “truly smoke free”, and as part of this, ensuring e-cigarettes are for sale in hospital shops.
Martin Dockrell, tobacco control lead for PHE, said: “There are two parts to being a smokefree hospital, one is not allowing smoking on the premises, the other is helping every smoker to quit.”
Professor John Newton, director for health improvement at PHE, said: “Our new review reinforces the finding that vaping is a fraction of the risk of smoking, at least 95 per cent less harmful, and of negligible risk to bystanders.”
Meanwhile, hot tea and heavy alcohol consumption can increase the risk of a deadly cancer five-fold, research has shown.
Oesophageal cancer – which causes almost 7,800 deaths each year in the UK – was already known to be linked to drinking alcohol and smoking, but those risks are heightened by the addition of daily cups of “burning hot” tea, scientists discovered.
The new tea warning emerged from China, where researchers followed the progress of 456,155 participants aged 30 to 79 for around nine years.
High-temperature tea-drinking combined with either alcohol consumption or smoking was associated with a greater risk of oesophageal cancer than hot tea alone.