Face the Facts

Background

It is estimated that 5,000 New Zealanders die every year from disease caused by smoking tobacco and exposure to second-hand smoke.
That’s 13 deaths a day.
Deaths from drugs, murder, suicide, road crashes, air crashes, poisoning, drowning, fires and falls cause terrible anguish. The tragedy is that each year tobacco use causes more deaths than all these things combined.

5,000 deaths is the equivalent of 14 passenger-laden 747s crashing with full loss of life each year.
It can be easy to ignore these deaths because they don’t happen quickly and violently like deaths reported by the media; many tobacco-related deaths are slow and agonising, taking place behind closed doors.
Behind each of those 5,000 deaths are families in anguish, having lost love ones.
Many have watched loved ones spend their last months hooked up to oxygen, coughing, wheezing, and struggling to breathe.
Reducing hospital waiting lists is a current government focus – fewer people smoking would greatly reduce the burden on hospitals and other healthcare services.

Face the Facts is an education approach, developed by HSC in conjunction with the Ministry of Health, to inform New Zealanders about the facts surrounding tobacco use. It aims to increase people’s knowledge about the harm that tobacco causes to smokers and to the wider community. It also aims to prompt quit smoking attempts.

The communications approach will be multi-faceted, including mass media and providing support at a community level. Face the Facts will present stark, factual information about smoking and tobacco use.

Objectives

To dispel some of the myths that prevent people from quitting smoking or resisting tobacco initiation and replace these with factual information.
To increase New Zealanders’ knowledge and awareness of specific issues surrounding tobacco and its use.
To provide a platform from which frontline health professionals can raise smoking with their clients – and support their quit attempts.
To motivate quit attempts.

Research around people’s knowledge of smoking-related harm

Research shows that some people have limited knowledge of the harms of smoking. For example, a third of New Zealanders believe that the dangers of smoking have been exaggerated – with smokers more likely to think this.

As well as lacking general knowledge, people lack specific knowledge about the harms of smoking. Smokers underestimate their own personal level of risk of developing smoking-related disease. Those who underestimate the health risks of smoking are less likely to think that quitting will reduce their changes of developing cancer. It is believed that these self-exempting beliefs allow smokers to rationalise their smoking behaviour.

Specific research findings include the following:

Smokers believe they are less at risk than the average smoker of developing smoking-related diseases.
Many smokers think they smoke too few cigarettes to be at risk of developing smoking-related diseases.
A recent survey found that half of all smokers believed ‘smoking is no more risky than a lot of other things people do’.
This survey also found that a third of New Zealanders believe that ‘the dangers of smoking have been exaggerated’.
The World Health Organization (2008) says, ‘relatively few tobacco users worldwide fully grasp its health risks’.
A 2006 International Tobacco Control study reported that smokers have a limited understanding of the link between smoking and serious diseases and strokes. Awareness and knowledge was particularly low among low socio-economic groups.

Audiences

The messages are aimed at a range of audiences including smokers, support networks of smokers, those in vulnerable population groups, and the New Zealand public in general.

Smoking. Face the facts.