Swapping smoking for vaping in England with Vera Buss and Leonie Brose

In this episode, Annika Theodoulou speaks to Dr Vera Buss, a Senior Research Fellow at University College London, and Professor Leonie Brose, a Professor of Addictions & Public Health at King's College London, UK. The interview covers Vera and Leonie’s research article examining the association between the national ‘Swap to Stop’ programme offering free vapes for smoking cessation and quit attempts in England.

• Background on the Swap to Stop program in England [01:10]
• The motivations behind the study [01:50]
• The Smoking Toolkit Study and using an Interrupted Time Series Analysis [03:00]
• The key findings of the study [04:50]
• The factors which Vera and Leonie adjusted for [07:00]
• The policy landscape in England regarding vaping as a smoking cessation aid [07:41]
• What can other countries learn from the findings [09:12]
• The surprising results of this study [09:50]
• The implications of the findings for policy and practice [10:36]

About Annika Theodoulou: Annika is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction at Flinders University, South Australia. Her work focuses on health behaviours, including smoking cessation and weight management, with an emphasis on evidence synthesis. She completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford, where her research examined socioeconomic inequalities in smoking cessation behaviours and outcomes using quantitative and qualitative methods. Her doctoral research was funded by the Society for the Study of Addiction and The Rotary Foundation. Annika is an Associate Editor of Nicotine & Tobacco Research and holds a Bachelor of Health Sciences and a Master of Clinical Science from the University of Adelaide.

About Vera Buss: Vera is a Senior Research Fellow in Behavioural Science at the UCL Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group and part of the Behavioural Research UK consortium. Her research focuses on understanding and monitoring tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption across Great Britain, drawing on the Smoking and Alcohol Toolkit Studies to evaluate national policies and population‑level behaviour change. Alongside her research, Vera co‑leads undergraduate and postgraduate teaching on health psychology and statistics for public health.

About Leonie Brose: Leonie is Professor of Addictions & Public Health at King's College London and Director of the National Institutes for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Policy Research Unit in Addictions. Most of Leonie's research has focused on tobacco control, smoking cessation, smoking and mental health and newer nicotine products and she has co-authored six government-commissioned reviews on vaping. Leonie is active in the Society for the Study of Addiction, the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and its European chapter. She also contributes as an Editorial Board member for Addiction and Nicotine & Tobacco Research and as Programme Lead for the MSc Addictions at King's.

Leonie is an Associate Editor for Addiction and a Trustee for the SSA.

Original article: Associations between the national ‘Swap to Stop’ programme offering free vapes for smoking cessation and quit attempts in England: Results from a population-based survey https://doi.org/10.1111/add.70332

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Music by Jack Shakespeare

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