Faithfully reproducing quotes from a selection of pharma shills with clear conflicts of interest, Nanny Beeb was thrilled to report that the service was the "jewel in the NHS crown".
Chris Snowdon fisked the unutterable garbage here, and Lord did it beg for it.
But, embarrassingly for our {cough} world-respected news gathering organisation, their overtly-partial simpering to the public sector tool of tobacco control has been rendered even more pathetic by, err, tobacco controllers themselves.
Here is what Aussie smoke-haters Simon Chapman and Mike Daube have to say about the glowing report of NHS 'success' at the BMJ.
West et al report that across 10 years, 5,453,180 smokers attended and set quit dates at English smoking cessation services operating through 151 English Primary Health Care Trusts (PHCTs). However, they do not specify if these were unique individuals or included multiple attendances by some smokers.
By applying relapse estimates to their four week data, they calculate a 12 month cessation yield above that which would have been expected from just writing a prescription for a smoking cessation treatment. For the most recent year this was an additional 21,723 ex-smokers. Averaged across the 151 PHCTs, this is 144 per PHCT, less than 3 each week.Not great for an outlay from our taxes of £84m per year, eh? When even rabid anti-smokers describe state-sponsored nagging as an abject failure, the waste of taxes is shown to be even more stark, no matter how much the state's mouthpiece try to pretend otherwise.
Jewel in the crown? Not really. More accurately one of those pretend gems like cubic zirconia, paste, or maybe a shiny beach pebble which kinda looks pretty but is just an inconsequential and valueless piece of rock.
Still, it's nice to see - in this era of much-needed austerity - our antipodean friends making a damn good case for the cutting of another wasteful £84m per annum from our obscenely swollen public sector.
What are you waiting for, Gideon? Get the fiscal shears out.
