Fun with numbers: NHS Stop Smoking Services

The BBC trot out the usual "alcohol abuse costs the NHS £2.7 billion a year" bullshit here.

What's interesting is this:

Trials suggest that brief advice from a GP, or practice nurse, leads to one in eight people reducing their drinking to within sensible levels. This, says the report, compares well with smoking cessation, where only one in 20 change their behaviour.

Righty-ho. This rather contradicts this from The Metro back in September 2009:

Researchers at the Department of Health based the figure on the two million successful quit attempts recorded since the introduction of NHS Stop Smoking Services [in 2000-01]. Reformed smokers are considered to have quit if they have kept away from cigarettes for a month. In the past decade, the percentage of smokers in the UK population has fallen from 28% to below 21%... More than half of all smokers have sought some kind of help or advice to help them quit.

If the one-in-twenty figure is correct (and it sounds about right), then those two million successful quit attempts equate to forty million visits to the NHS Stop Smoking Services, and as there are only about about ten million smokers, that would mean each smoker has tried the NHS Stop Smoking Service four times over the last eight years (which cannot possibly be true). So is it each smoker four times or half of smokers once? A bit of a f***ing discrepancy, methinks.

So let's assume it's half of smokers, with a one-in-twenty quit rate, that would allow the NHS to take credit for one-fortieth of all smokers having given up (of whom heck knows how many would have quit anyway). Seeing as the number of smokers has fallen by a quarter over the last ten years anyway, that's not much of an achievement by the NHS, is it?

Finally, it appears that the NHS spends £60 million a year on Stop Smoking Services, let's call it £500 million since 2000-01. If the NHS have helped 350,000 people stop smoking (i.e. adult population 50 million x 28% = 14 million divided by 40 = 350,000), the cost works out at a princely £1,500 per smoker who quits, a heck of a lot for a few chats and some chewing gum.