NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign: Unfavorable Health Effects of Tobacco - Essay Sample

Introduction

The NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign is a strategy which highlights the harms of smoking. The campaign exposes the unfavorable health results of tobacco by explaining its Toxic Cycle in the body of human beings. This campaign elaborates the poisons, which is created in human blood through cigarettes smoking and the damage which the smoke does to the brain, heart and lungs. Thus, the NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign which was conducted in 2014 in England advertised on the cycle of the toxins which gets to people's body through inhaling cigarette's smoke. This campaign showed that when one smokes cigarettes, and inhales that smoke, it heads into healthy lungs. After some time, with wheezing breaths, the lungs begin heaving and twitching as the toxic black smoke goes in the respiratory system. When the poisonous smoke reaches the lungs, it then diffuses into the streams of blood, and mixes with healthy human blood, making it darker and thicker. The contaminated blood heads to the heart, causing it to pump faster than the average rate because the blood is more viscous and harder to pump. Then the pumped blood goes directly towards the brain. Thus, the campaign advertised that every time a person smokes a cigarette, the blood gets contaminated and thicker and circulates throughout the body in seconds thus increasing chances of a heart attack or stroke leading to death. This essay highlights the aims and objectives, theoretical underpinning, evaluation, effectiveness and impact, the strength and weakness of the NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign of 2014 in London.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Aims and Objectives of the Campaign

The main aim and objective of the NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign 2014 in London was to reduce the number of youth smokers. The campaign aimed at creating a smoking-free London zone by transforming the social environment that makes smoking socially acceptable, helping addicted users to quit smoking and preventing non-smokers, especially youths from starting to smoke. It also aimed at educating the young people of England on the risks of smoking cigarettes to create a completely smoke-free England. The campaign was aiming to alert, informing and motivating the people of England to make sure that they are aware of what they are supposed to do to live a healthy life. The campaign also had an objective of supporting the development of an environment which is conducive to facilitate change, help in driving cultural acceptances of positive conducts and support potential governmental levers like legislation in regulating the tobacco use. The campaign offered essential tools to help individuals sustain and start a behavior change journey. It also aimed at galvanizing and amplifying the efforts of the people willing to improve their health issues across its partners in the public, voluntary and commercial sectors. The campaign also reminded both those people who practice smoking and those who do not, about the dangers of secondhand smoke to their families and children. The campaign highlighted the immediate damages which are facilitated by every single cigarette a person smokes to meet its primary goal of reducing the number of smokers in London. The message of the campaign was linked to the fact that every 15 cigarettes a person smokes lead to a mutation which leads to cancer, and thus the campaign message aims to increase the motivation level of smokers to quit.

The Theoretical Underpinning of the Campaign

The theoretical underpinning of the NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign in England was based on several policies on theoretical constructs. For this campaign to be effective, it considered behavioral theories. The behaviorism focuses on how human beings learn to behave in a particular way. The approach was created from two leading schools of policies which include classical conditioning and operant conditioning (Campbell & Lee 2019). The classical conditioning is whereby individuals learn on associating two past unrelated stimuli. Thus, concerning the cigarette smoking, people may learn on associating smoking with other events and feelings, for instance, in a situation where one is stressed, he or she may feel the best way to get rid of the stress is smoking. This theory explains why people may tend to smoke in stressful situations. In operant conditioning, it posits that its consequences shape smoking behavior . Under this school of ideas, tobacco contains nicotine and thus when it is inhaled, it facilitates a quick dopamine release which makes the smoker have a pleasant feeling that reinforces and rewards the behavior leading to addiction. These policies underpin the behavior al modifications approach to cigarette smoking cessations. These approaches have their focus to change the patterns and habits that cue the tobacco use, to replace it with other more desirable behavior s, reward abstinence and emphasize on the longer terms and immediate benefits of quitting cigarette smoking. Reviews of behavior al intervention for tobacco smoking cessation shows reported that moderate successes in stopping cigarette take around six months.

This campaign was also underpinned by the social cognitive theory, which is an extension of the social learning theory. This theory argues that an individual learns a specific behavior from other people through modelling, instructions, or observations. The policy inflates to on behaviorism through its explanation on certain practices as products of reciprocal interaction between environmental, behavior al and cognitive influences. Vital tenets of the social cognitive theory are beliefs, self-efficacies and expectations of a person to execute a particular duty successfully. This theory posits that self-efficacy is indispensable for any behavior transformation. Some studies have proven that a positive liaison between smoking behavior s and self-efficacy. The social learning theory creates the core of cognitive behavior al therapies considering that a person's thought, feeling and action can interrelate with and encourage each other in maintaining smoking behavior s. The cognitive behavior al theory aims to break the emotional and situational bonds that have been created during smoking practices. This campaign used this theory to develop behavior al strategies aiming at pleasurable correlations and situational cues which support and uphold smoking. The campaign also used the cognitive approach to aim the emotions and cognitions, which enact a part in tobacco use. For instance, an individual may hold a belief that one cannot control smoking desires or believe that smoking cigarette helps deal with stressful situations.

The NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign 2014 in England was underpinned by the theory of planned behavior (TPB) which assumes that an individual's behavioral intents and conducts are decided by his or her attitude, social pressures, subjective customs and their power or degree of control over their desires. A meta-analysis which explored the TPB efficacy revealed that the theory is useful in predicting the intents and behavior s across an array health behavior . A particular study showed that the theory of planned behavior firmly predicts conducts and smoking aims, mostly the perceived behavior al control (Coggon 2020). Another study explored the TPB and tobacco smoking cessations, pointed out the predictive values of norms and attitudes in the aims of quitting smoking. Besides, the health belief model (HBM) also underpins the campaign basing on the expectancy. The HBM is a value policy which theorizes that people's expectations and values drive motivations. This theory is created to envisage the behavior s which are related to health issues making it one of the most fundamental models applied in health behavior practices and researches. It insinuates that engaging or failing to engage in health indorsing behavior s can be foreseen by individuals' perceived susceptibility (beliefs concerning their risks of contracting certain health conditions), perceived threats (a feeling about the earnestness of contracting a smoking behavior ), a perceived benefit of abiding by the health actions. Regarding smoking, the HBD predicts that cigarette smoking is determined by one's perception concerning: susceptibility to the diseases relating to the tobacco use; barriers, benefits and costs of smoking and quitting the behavior ; and the catalyze of changing the behavior .

The social-ecological model also underpinned this campaign on encouraging people to quit smoking. This model accentuates the reciprocal associations between the social environment and smoking the behavior s. Through this theory, the campaign focused on creating a conducive environment to facilitate the transformation of smokers. A favorable situation is imperative in the promotion of adoption of health behavior. Therefore, an intervention established on this model is multisectoral, multi-levelled (emphasizing community, organizational, interpersonal, individual and public policy influences) and complicated. Thus, in the context of controlling smoking in England, exponents of the social-ecological model argue that traditional theories like the theory of planned behavior and health belief model, emphasize mostly on the rational choices and individuals-level but ignore the potent manners in which smoking can influence smoking behavior . Using this model, one can consider the essentiality of public health experts through the use of the multileveled, multisectoral intervention in controlling the use of tobacco in London. Interventions being grounded on the perception of people decision making are not much use as they argue and may inadvertently have their patronage on the tobacco industry's framing of tobacco-related illnesses as the outcome of unfortunate but informed people choices.

The campaign was also supported by the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), which facilitates the provision of cognitive conceptual frameworks to investigate the smoking rate among adolescents. The policy of cognitive is imperative as it holds a critical task in the process of decision making, which results in a behavior al smoking change. The PMT has double pathways which include the Coping Appraisal and Threat Appraisal. It connects the two appraisals to determine the possibility of whether an adolescent will smoke or not. Threat Appraisal evaluates the maladaptive behavior s, and it entails four constructs in two categories which are Perceived Rewards (extrinsic and intrinsic rewards) and Perceived Threat (vulnerability and severity) (Kmietowicz, 2018). On the other hand, Coping Appraisal evaluates the ability of an individual in managing and avoiding threats. It has three constructs in two groups which entail, perceived cost (response cost) and perceived efficacy (self-efficacy and response efficacy) (Kmietowicz, 2018). In this case, the people who view smoking as a great danger and have high coping adaptability power to non-smoking behavior s are not likely to use tobacco substances.

Evaluation of the Campaign

The NHS Smoke-Free Health Harm Campaign 2014 in England exposed the detrimental effects of smoking on the people of England to create a tobacco-free society. As per the campaign, those who were willing to stop smoking were offered ranges of support tools for free which included, supportive text messages and emails, Quit Kits, Smartphone app and face-to-face support. This campaign used the communication toolkit, which contained statistics and facts, advice and template copy which helps people share the campaign information with their local media, partners and stakeholders. The communication toolkit included the data on the resources of the campaign and timeline, which helps in planning the commu...