Smoking kills more people than any other avoidable factor in the UK, and smoking cessation interventions are among the most cost effective treatments in medicine.¹ Guidelines recommending routine implementation of smoking ascertainment and cessation in clinical practice were first published in the UK in 1998,² and in the same year the UK government allocated funding to establish specialist smoking cessation services throughout the National Health Service.³ Since 2001 the antismoking drug bupropion and all nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products have been available on NHS prescription, and their use supported by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.⁴ The strong message of these policy developments is that advising smokers to quit, and providing behavioural and therapeutic cessation support, should by now be a standard component of medical practice. The recent Omnibus survey of Great Britain⁵ provides an opportunity to discover if this is indeed the case.

PARTICIPANTS, METHODS, AND RESULTS

The Omnibus survey …