With legislation due to ban smoking in public places next year, NHS Tayside is expecting a major increase in demand for services to help wannabe quitters.

Paul Ballard, the organisation’s consultant in public health, said today staff are gearing up to expand “smoking cessation services” to meet the need.

In addition to nurses and other health professionals expanding existing stop smoking classes and other services for quitters, there are plans to recruit and train lay people to deliver support.

Within the next few months the call will go out for anyone wanting to help, whether a reformed smoker or a never-have-touched-a-ciggie person.

“You don’t necessarily have to have been a smoker,” said Mr Ballard.

“NHS staff who do this have not all necessarily been smokers. It is a skill and people can be trained to do it.”

He said help to quit would be available to anyone who wanted to give up smoking but services would be concentrated on areas where the need was known to be greatest.

Mr Ballard said smoking rates were highest in areas of deprivation and, while there were pockets of heavy smoking and deprivation across Tayside that would be tackled, Dundee had the greatest problem.

“Dundee is the biggie,” he said. There are something like 13 areas (in Tayside) with smoking rates of over 40%.

“In two or three it’s 50%. That’s where we want to focus most of our resources.

“We are on the case here. We have done a lot of work and we know where the gaps (in services) are and we want to address that.”

In recent years the NHS has worked in partnership with local authorities to deliver services in local communities but Mr Ballard admitted there is still much more to be done.

“One of the things we discovered (through a recent review of smoking cessation services) was that everybody is working very hard and doing a good job and seeing quite a lot of people in the community who want to give up smoking, but we see across Tayside about 8000 people per annum who come forward to give up smoking.

“In Tayside there are 97,000 smokers and we know that something like 70,000 of them actually want to give up.”

He stressed smoking rates were a national problem, not unique to Tayside and the region was “one of the leading areas” in terms of effectiveness of its smoking cessation services. However there was a need to do more to meet the demand.

“One of the things we are going to look at is training local people as smoking cessation counsellors. We already have a buddy system and are going to develop that further.

“These people will be trained in a certain way so they can then support NHS professionals in the community to deliver services to those wanting to quit.

“We will increase local capacity so we have lots more people able to support those who want to give up.”

In addition local pharmacies will also be encouraged to offer nicotine replacement therapy (patches) with counselling, a double-pronged approach that has a higher success rate than nicotine substitutes in isolation.