Leadership
Roadmap stop 5
Getting buy-in to a local alliance from senior leaders both within and outside a local authority can help ensure there’s broad membership and be key to an alliance’s success.
Establishing links into Health and Wellbeing Boards and Health Scrutiny Committees and making tobacco a priority area to report on will give this agenda momentum and ensure senior colleagues are receiving regular updates on activity. Identifying these reporting channels should also ensure the alliance is reporting into NHS structures, such as ICS prevention boards.
Across broader footprints, having tobacco as a priority within STP/ICS prevention strategies will be key to ensuring smokers in the NHS are getting the support and treatment they need in line with the commitments set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.
Engaging senior leaders can also increase accountability. Having elected members chairing alliance meetings makes them partially accountable for alliance activity and helps ensure there’s someone in the room that can hold others accountable for their activity.
See more on accountability under ‘Governance: running your alliance’ (below).
Directors of Public Health
Directors of Public Health (DPHs) are key stakeholders and establishing their relationship or role within an alliance can be a key determinant of its success.
DPHs have a strategic role in relation to health inequalities and working to quantify and illustrate the impact of tobacco control upon local health inequalities will help present a strong case for their involvement.
Check out the Health Inequalities Resource Pack to help you make this case.
Elected members
Engaging councillors in your local alliance is often an effective way of raising and maintaining the profile of tobacco control across the council or wider regional partnership.
Having an elected member as Chair of the alliance will help provide strategic leadership and accountability.
These Councillor briefings set out the evidence-base on tobacco control issues such as illicit trade, local costs of smoking and smoking related litter and point towards actions the council can take to reduce smoking related harms. These can be used to engage a range of councillors in the work of an alliance depending on their priorities and interests.
Research by ASH and Cancer Research UK has found that political support for tobacco control in local authorities can mitigate – though not remove – the threat of budget cuts.
Primary care
Smokers see their GP a third more than non-smokers, making the support smokers are offered in primary care very important.
As commissioners, CCGs are key partners to ensuring smokers receive evidence based support in both primary and secondary care.
Leaders within CCGs can help ensure that treating tobacco dependence is embedded in contracts and activity monitored.
Ideally, all alliances should have a CCG representative but if this isn’t possible, ensuring that the alliance has a named contact to report into and liaise with at the CCG is crucial.
Primary Care Networks are also increasingly important. Pooling primary care resources and capacity across these footprints should create scope for broader engagement on public health. Engaging PCNs prior to introduction of the Health Inequalities specification in 2021/22 should help ensure PCNs build smoking cessation into this activity.
NHS Trusts
NHS Trusts are key delivery partners. The Tobacco Control Plan sets the ambition for all Trusts in England to be smokefree by April 2020, through comprehensive implementation of “tobacco dependence treatment pathways” in line with NICE Guidance PH48.
This will help ensure successful roll-out of The NHS Long Term Plan commitments on smoking, which should help making treating tobacco dependency a priority for NHS colleagues. While full LTP funding won’t be in place until 2023/24 all partners should be making progress ahead of this deadline.
Clinical champions for are important for driving forwards this agenda. As well as individual clinicians, post-holders such as ‘Maternity Safety Champions’ can be useful contacts for this.
Having Alliance representation from local acute or mental health trusts and maternity teams enables collaboration and helps ensure colleagues see tobacco control as an ‘NHS issue’.