Smoking prevalence recognised in Public Health Outcome Framework

The Government has published the 2013-2016 public health outcomes framework today in three parts. The published documents provide an overview of the framework including the outcomes and indicators (Part 1), the technical details e.g. indicator definition and data source (Part 2) and the impact and equalities impact assessments (Part 3). All documents are available here.

The framework focuses on two high-level outcomes:

1. Increased healthy life expectancy
2. Reduced differences in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy between communities

To measure progress year-on-year against these over-arching outcomes a set of supporting indicators has been developed and grouped into four domains: 1) improving the wider determinants of health, 2) health improvement, 3) health protection and 4) healthcare public health and preventing premature mortality.

Within the health improvement domain there are three specific smoking-related outcomes:

• 2.3 Smoking status at time of delivery per 100 maternities
• 2.9 Prevalence of smoking among 15 year olds
• 2.14 Prevalence of smoking among persons aged 18 years and over

In addition a number of mortality based indicators have been included within the ‘healthcare public health and preventing premature mortality’ domain to which, although not specifically stated, comprehensive tobacco control would significantly contribute towards.