A new study published in the journal Thorax suggests that routinely offering smokers cessation support while they were in the hospital could significantly cut smoking rates and save the British National Health Service vital funds.

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Smoking-related hospital admissions “represent an avoidable drain on scarce financial and wider NHS resources,” according to the researchers.

The researchers behind the new study, from the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Institute for Lung Health at Glenfield Hospital near Leicester, note that smoking was responsible for over 460,000 admissions to National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the UK during 2011-12.

Treating these smoking-related diseases cost the NHS over £5 billion (nearly $8 billion) – about 5% of its annual budget.

“Since smoking is entirely preventable and treatable,” write the researchers, “many hospital admissions represent an avoidable drain on scarce financial and wider NHS resources.”

The researchers add that treating smoking should be a high priority for health services, but the proportion of smokers who receive treatment for smoking from the NHS every year is “extremely low and falling.”

This low engagement with smokers, write the authors, represents a failure by the NHS to “treat the biggest avoidable cause of disease, death and social inequality in health in the UK,” as well as a failure to manage NHS budgets effectively by prioritizing cost-effectiveness.

In 2013, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended that smoking cessation support should be offered to all smokers in hospitals. To evaluate what impact this guideline would have if fully implemented, the new study audited the prevalence of smoking among NHS hospital inpatients, the number of smokers treated and the number of potential opportunities for smoking cessation by treatment group during 2010-11.

The researchers found that, during 2010-11, about 1.1 million smokers were admitted to UK hospitals, totaling 2.6 million episodes of care. An average of 1 in 6 people admitted to the hospital are current smokers, the study reports. However, patients with mental health problems are three times more likely than the average patient to be a current smoker – more than half of this group are smokers.

“Implementation of current NICE guidance to deliver smoking cessation interventions as a routine component of secondary care provision could have a major impact on the prevalence of smoking, and hence on the morbidity and mortality that smoking causes,” the authors conclude.

Commenting on the findings, a spokesperson for the British Thoracic Society says:

Smokers who are admitted to hospital include some of the poorest members of our society. This study shows that the NHS is missing regular opportunities to transform their lives through simple yet highly cost-effective measures to help them stop smoking.

The health services regulators […] need to hold hospital chief executives to account and stop them ignoring the NICE recommendations to help people admitted to hospital to quit smoking.”

In August, a study published in JAMA found that a post-discharge intervention helped smokers in the US quit following stays in the hospital.

In that study, 397 hospitalized smokers who wanted to quit were randomized to receive either sustained or standard tobacco treatment care.

The sustained care participants received automated interactive voice response telephone calls and free smoking cessation medication of their choice for up to 90 days. The standard care participants received recommendations for counseling and medications.

Six months after discharge, 26% of the sustained care participants were no longer smoking, compared with 15% of the standard care patients.