The aims of the NHS
growth in funding seen before the significant reductions in spending in 2009/10. Public trust may increase if there was more transparency in NHS government funding and perhaps if the BritishMedical Association (BMA) and other pressure groups improved the communications between public medical needs and government funding. This would help the NHS fulfil Aim I in the long-term and Aim II to a greater level. Smoking Seen as one of the means of inflicting the most harm on your body, smoking is the greatest causes of preventable illness. 9 Smoking had previously been seen as acceptable and the UK, in the 1930s, had the highest lung cancer rate in the world. 10 However, since then the proportion of the UK adult population who smoke cigarettes has fallen to 15.1% in 2017 11 and this has seen a reduction in smoking-related diseases. The following section will investigate how and why this can be seen as a successful governmental initiative. The pioneer of this fight to tackle smoking was Richard Doll. His study 12 found smokers to be more likely to die of lung cancer than non-smokers. 13 This event was hugely significant in the emergence of the UK government’s attempt to reduce the level of smoking. However, one may ask why it took over 50 years for smoking to be banned in public places. Cigarettes contain the highly addictive nicotine,
and this can help our understanding as to why it has been a long, sustained effort in combatting smoking. Significantly, cigarette smoke provides a rapid burst of nicotine, something which other alternatives do not offer. The government’s first attempts were at prohibiting the advertising of smoking, with public information’s role to spread awareness of the devastating consequences of smoking; this led to measures being taken up by
Figure 2: Proportion of smokers who have quit, all persons aged 16 and over 1
companies, including British Rail in 1974, increasing the proportion of accommodation for non- smokers. 14 Soon after there were many reports of implications for people in the immediate vicinity of smokers (passive smoking), and as pressuremounted on the government to tackle this issue, eventually there was a breakthrough: smoking was banned in public places. This was the culmination in the fight against smoking and paved the way for smoking levels plummeting to under 20%.
Figure 2 clearly conveys the change. Smoking levels have plummeted and the number of smokers who have quit are at record levels. The 2007 ban on smoking in public areas and 2015 ban on smoking in a car with someone under 18 has been a clear attempt to tackle smoking and, more importantly, to reduce
9 National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, 2015. 10 Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), 2017. 11 Office for National Statistics, 2018. 12 Doll, 1954. 13 Welch, 2018 14 Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), 2017.
44
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software