Projects & Research Partnerships

Introduction

Vapes, also known as e-cigarettes, are considered lower risk products compared to conventional cigarettes. Over the last decade vapes have become a popular stop smoking aid in the UK. However, vapes are being developed to appeal to non-smoking customers, particularly to young people, by changing flavours, packaging and providing cheap disposable products.

Little is known about the long-term impacts of using vapes on health and the impact of changing policies about vapes on the use of tobacco products. Mathematical models can be used to gather and analyse data to understand how potential policy options related to vapes, for example, a ban on disposable vapes, would affect use of vapes and tobacco products in different groups, such as young people.

To date some data have been collected, but we do not currently have a good overview of the data or know what further data collection would be useful to understand and compare the impacts of different vape policies that the government may consider implementing.

Aim of the research

This project aims to learn what type of research about vapes would be most useful for policy making, what data already exists to go into this type of analysis and what new data are needed.

Design and methods

We will hold a workshop with key policy makers (e.g. Department of Health, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Trading Standards), non-governmental policy experts (e.g. Action on Smoking and Health), lay members, and experts in public health, behavioural science, data collection/analysis and modelling methods. The workshop will aim to understand possible future vaping policy options, how they would work to change behaviour, any unintended effects of the policies and which groups of the population might be most at risk of harm or benefit from these policies.

The policy options discussed will be selected based on the government's priorities and plans at the time. We will develop a shared understanding of this complex problem and identify the best types of mathematical models to help with policy decisions. We will then be able to identify what data exist to go into these types of models, with input from our collaborators, stakeholders and targeted literature reviews. We will set out any problems with the existing data, where data is missing and what would be needed to collect further useful data.

We will develop a draft report describing all of this and ask the people who attended the first workshop, and some international experts, to review it. We will hold a second workshop which aims to discuss and resolve any key issues arising from this review, which will improve the final report.

Patient and public involvement (PPI)

PPI has informed the research plan. We will hold a pre-workshop PPI meeting to discuss views on e-cigarette policies and behaviours which will feed into the first workshop. We will involve six members of the public within the workshops and to comment on the draft report. We will also ask our PPI members about dissemination of the findings.

We will make sure that we have diverse public representation and include people who smoke, vape and young adults who do not smoke or vape.

Dissemination

We will ask the members of our workshops about their views on the best approaches to dissemination of the key findings. We plan to describe the research in a report for the NIHR Journals Library, stakeholder events, conferences, journal articles and webinars.