Kay is a Public Health and Commissioning Manager at Nottinghamshire County Council. Her role involves providing public health advice and designing activities and interventions that will meet the needs of the County’s population.
She works in the smoking & tobacco team and her current focus is on preventing smoking and vaping in young people and protecting people from second-hand smoke.
As an ex-smoker herself, Kay is passionate about helping people to stop smoking. The daughter of two smokers and surrounded by other family members and friends who smoked, she started smoking in her late teens and considered smoking to be normal.
It's normal for you, everybody's smoking. Your friends smoke, your parents smoke. My grandparents smoked. I came from an environment where everybody smoked.
Kay knows very well how difficult it is to quit.
Aware of the health harms and conscious that her smoking habit was costing her money she could ill afford, Kay talks about how desperate she was to quit. Starting out in her career, she moved out of home but found the search for rental accommodation difficult because many landlords didn’t welcome smokers.
She first tried to stop smoking when she was 21 and went ‘cold turkey’, as there were very few local services available then to support people who wanted to quit smoking. That attempt didn’t stick, and over the next few years she made a number of attempts to quit.
She finally succeeded as she was planning to start a family, but talks about how challenging it was.
I was so bad tempered for several weeks, I was really grumpy and difficult to live with. That was awful. It was awful for about a month. I was just really bad tempered. But after that, I stopped and I kind of got used to it.
Kay thinks that her lived experience of smoking and quitting gives her good insight into the difficulties that smokers face. She feels grateful to have a job where she can make a difference, helping smokers to quit and protecting non-smokers – and particularly children - from the dangers of tobacco-related harm such as second-hand smoke.
She puts great faith in the support and services that are available to smokers these days, and sees part of her role to encourage smokers to take advantage of the help that is available to them.
In particular, she feels there is a role for vaping as a route to quitting smoking She emphasises, however, that people who don’t smoke shouldn’t start to vape, as although vaping is less harmful than smoking, it’s not harmless.
They’re so much less harmful than cigarettes that if you are a smoker, there isn't really any reason not to switch to a vape. Because the vape hasn't got the tar and carbon monoxide in it that causes cancer. Although obviously, I wouldn’t recommend a vape to a non-smoker: people who don’t smoke, shouldn’t start to vape.
What advice would I give to smokers?
Even though it’s incredibly hard to give up smoking, it’s possibly easier to quit now than it was when I was trying, because there are more services available to help you. There are more products as well: the nicotine gum and the patches, the medication and the vapes even, none of that was there when I tried to give up.
I would definitely use those things if I was trying to quit now, because I've read the stats. You’re about three times more likely to give up successfully if you use a support service.
You should do the best you can to give up the easiest way possible for you, whatever that is.