IMPACT SNAPSHOT: SCIMITAR+ Smoking Cessation Program for Severe Mental Illness

We developed tailored smoking cessation for people with severe mental illness, doubling quit rates and securing inclusion in NICE guidelines and NHS Long Term Plan.

#Sickness to Prevention
#Hospital to Community

The Yorkshire and Humber ARC’s SCIMITAR+ project has developed and validated an effective smoking cessation intervention specifically tailored for people with severe mental illness (SMI), directly addressing a major health inequality.

Key Impacts:
• Successfully developed and tested a bespoke smoking cessation intervention for people with SMI in the largest trial of its kind.
• Demonstrated that participants were twice as likely to have quit smoking at 6 months compared to usual care.
• Findings formally incorporated into NICE guideline NG209 on tobacco prevention and treatment.
• Model adopted at national policy level within the NHS Long Term Plan.
• Intervention integrated into the Community Mental Health Tobacco Treatment Training Suite on the National Centre for Smoking Cessation Training platform.
• Created comprehensive training materials now used to train mental health staff across the NHS.

The project addresses a critical health inequality: people with SMI are 3-4 times more likely to smoke than the general population, and unlike the general population, smoking rates in this group have remained stubbornly high. By developing an intervention specifically tailored to this population’s needs, and successfully integrating it into national clinical guidelines and training programs, the SCIMITAR+ program is transforming how the NHS approaches smoking cessation for people with mental health conditions. This work directly contributes to reducing the 15-20 year mortality gap experienced by people with SMI, for whom smoking is a major contributing factor to poor physical health outcomes.