NHS Stop Smoking Services Scotland
April 2024 to March 2025

About this release

This annual release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides an annual update on statistics from NHS Stop Smoking Services in Scotland for the period April 2024 to March 2025, including trend data from 2015/16. This release is supplemented by an interactive dashboard and Excel workbook.

Main points

• In 2024/25 the number of attempts to stop smoking made with the help of NHS smoking cessation services increased to 31,095, a 2.6% increase from 2023/24 (30,317).
• While there was an increase in 2024/25, the overall trend for Scotland shows a reduction in the number of quit attempts since 2015/16 of 52% from 64,721.

• Of those making a quit attempt 45.7% (14,198) reported that they were still not smoking at four weeks. This figure fell to 29.2% (9,075) at twelve weeks.
• Of the 14,198 self-reported four-week quits, 2,904 (20.5%) were validated as not smoking through carbon monoxide (CO) testing and 374 (2.6%) were confirmed as smoking. 10,920 (76.9%) had no carbon monoxide reading taken or the result was unknown
• In 2024/25, NHSScotland achieved 76.2% (5,352 out of 7,026) of the required annual Local Delivery Plan (LDP) Standard target (see background). This is a 2.2% increase on the equivalent figure of 74.0% in 2023/24.
• One out of fourteen NHS Boards exceeded their annual LDP Standard target during the financial year 2024/25. NHS Board performances against their annual LDP Standard targets ranged from 18.4% to 125.5%.

Background

Smoking cessation services in Scotland are delivered as specialist services that offer structured behavioural support delivered in groups or in one-to-one sessions and are often provided together with licensed pharmacotherapy. This support is delivered by specially trained staff in a variety of NHS and non-NHS settings. There are also pharmacy based smoking cessation services, which complement the specialist smoking cessation services and provides a course of advice and nicotine replacement therapy over a period of up to 12 weeks. More information can be found on the NHS Inform site.

In July 2005 a national smoking cessation database was set up to capture data on people presenting to NHS services in Scotland for help to stop smoking. This database collects the mandatory service user information required for national monitoring purposes for smoking cessation services from all 14 NHS Boards in Scotland. This information has been used to generate this report. 

The Local Delivery Plan Standard for NHS boards was designed to embed and sustain successful smoking quits at 12 weeks post quit in the 40 per cent most deprived areas (60 per cent in the Island Boards) measured by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. The annual target was set that 1.5% of smokers in these areas would have a self-reported successful twelve-week quit (have abstained from smoking for 12 weeks) through smoking cessation services. For NHSScotland this was set at 7,026 12-week quits in 2019/20. During the COVID-19 pandemic updates of this target was paused. Subsequently this has not been updated since 2019/20, and the target has been maintained at 7,026 for 2024/25.

The figures presented here on quit attempts include only those attempted through NHS stop smoking services and do not include those attempted through private services or self-led attempts. Figures are based on total quit attempts set during the year, rather than total number of people with a recorded quit attempt, so could include repeat quit attempts for the same person. More detailed information on quit attempts can also be found within the NHS Stop Smoking Services Scotland annual report.

For this release there are two minor revisions to note. These have been assessed and do not impact on the narrative or conclusions drawn from previously released figures. For more information on the impacts of these changes see Appendix 2 in report.

• While updating the analysis for 2024/25 it was noted that due to a historic misallocation of a census 2011 category that for the time period covered (2015/16 to present) figures for 'Caribbean or Black' were undercounted while the category 'Asian, Scottish Asian, British Asian' was overcounted. This has been corrected in this release.
• For the first time this report uses antenatal care booking as denominator for percentage of pregnant women with current tobacco addiction accessing smoking cessation services, whereas in previous years Scottish Morbidity Records (SMR02) was used. This means figures from this year are not directly comparable with previous years.

Further information

Open data from this publication is available from the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data platform.

The next release of this publication will be Autumn 2026.