Building relationships: Why tobacco control matters to you
Roadmap stop 4
Building relationships is key to establishing an Alliance (see ‘Suggested membership‘ in previous step). These short briefings should help you engage with colleagues in:
- Trading Standards
- Children’s Services
- Environmental Health
- Police
- Fire & Rescue Services
- NHS organisations
- District Councils
Establishing face-to-face meetings to bring these partners together initially can be a useful first step for engaging partners within an alliance.
Building these relationships and getting partners involved in alliance activity is a key way to ensure tobacco becomes a priority across local authorities and partner organisations and creates advocates for tobacco control activity outside of public health teams.
Using national hooks such as the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle, or key media opportunities like Stoptober can be a good time to bring new partners to the table.
Partners may also engage through other networks such as Local Maternity Systems that link into and provide updates to the Alliance. For more on this see ‘Issue focused collaboration’ (below).
Local data
When trying to engage new partners or make the case for tobacco control with elected members, there are a range of data orientated tools and resources that you may find helpful.
Local authority level data:
- ASH Ready Reckoner
- PHE Local Tobacco Control Profiles
- NHSE Smoking Status at Time of Delivery (SATOD)
- Statistics on NHS Stop Smoking Services England
- ASH costs of smoking to social housing
Regional level data:
Resources for engaging partners
- Short briefings on engaging alliance partners (above)
- ASH’s Councillor Briefings for engaging your elected members
- ASH’s Webinars
- ASH/Fresh Strategic Guidance for Local Authorities: The End of Smoking
- Reports on: Local tobacco control and service commissioning, Social care, Housing, Mental health and Smoking in pregnancy
- Information and resources from the Smoking in Pregnancy Challenge Group and Mental Health & Smoking Partnership to help engage your NHS colleagues.
Check out the ‘Local data’ box (above) for local statistics to help you make the case for tobacco control and ASH’s Local Toolkit for further resources and materials.