NHS England hopes to save thousands of lives with pill that helps smokers quit

Hundreds of thousands of smokers will be given a pill that increases people’s chances of quitting, in a move that NHS bosses believe will save thousands of lives.

About 85,000 people a year in England will be offered the chance to use varenicline, a once-a-day tablet that experts say is as effective as vapes at helping people to kick the habit.

Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, hailed the pill as a potential “gamechanger” in the fight to tackle smoking and the huge harm to health it causes.

The drug helps people to quit by reducing their cravings for nicotine and ensuring that it cannot affect the brain in its usual way. It has also been found to reduce the side-effects smokers can experience when they stop using tobacco, such as trouble sleeping and irritability.

The NHS in England will give varenicline as part of its efforts to keep driving down the number of people who smoke. A decline in smoking rates over the past 20 years means that only 11.6% of adults in England still have the habit – about 6 million people.

Health service bosses hope its use will lead to 9,500 fewer smoking-related deaths over the next five years.

The drug – known at the time as Champix – began being used in 2006 and was taken by about 85,800 people a year until July 2021. It then became unavailable after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which regulates drugs, found impurities in it.

That problem has now been addressed to the MHRA’s satisfaction and it has recently approved a generic version of the drug, which NHS England will use. It cited research by University College London that found it would save £1.65 in healthcare costs for every £1 it spent on the pill.

The pharmaceutical firm Teva UK will provide the generic version of the drug.

Smoking experts welcomed varenicline’s return. Dr Nicola Lindson, an associate professor at Oxford university, said: “[It] is one of the most effective ways to quit smoking, especially when combined with behavioural support, such as counselling.”

Hazel Cheeseman, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, welcomed the move but said the NHS also needed to improve the help it gives to smokers to quit.

Meanwhile, hospital bosses in England have said Labour will fail in its mission to get NHS waiting times back on track by the end of this parliament. In a survey by NHS Providers, the bosses of all acute health trusts that took part said they thought it was unlikely or very unlikely that waits for routine hospital care would be back to 18 weeks – the maximum set out in the NHS constitution – by mid-2029.

One trust boss said: “The government have got the most focus on getting back to 18 weeks, which is the hardest standard to meet of all. If you think, there were seven million people on a waiting list, and as fast as you take them off, currently we’re putting more people on.”

The £22bn extra guaranteed to the NHS by the chancellor over the next two years will not be enough to overcome the service’s deeply ingrained problems, such as lack of access to GPs, an increasingly sick population and difficulty discharging patients who are medically fit to leave, trust bosses say.

Saffron Cordery, NHS Providers’ deputy chief executive, said: “There will be progress [on the 18-week target] but can trust leaders, with hand on heart, say that they’re going to meet that 18-week standard [by 2029]? I think that is really difficult and challenging to predict.”

The survey of 171 trust leaders from 118 trusts also identified nervousness about how the NHS in England would cope with the coming winter.