Training and funding available to support Smoking Cessation activity

Background:

BVSC has been commissioned through Birmingham Public Health to support organisations in the Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) Sector to play a crucial role in reaching smokers in the different communities of Birmingham. VCFSEs can play an important role in engaging and signposting smokers and those using smokeless tobacco to information and support to quit.    

Many VCFSE organisations work in communities and with cohorts who experience socio-economic disadvantages and cohorts where smoking rates are higher and habits entrenched. There is an established link between deprivation and smoking prevalence. These include people with mental health and substance misuse issues.  

The Project:  

Will provide free training to organisations working across the VCFSE sector. Training will be delivered through in person training initially and later in the year through an e-learning module. The training will encourage organisations to adopt an ‘every contact matters’ approach where support to quit smoking is consistently raised with both tobacco users and those who are the family and friends of smokers.  

The Training: 

We are inviting participants to an initial two hour in-person training session which will contextualise the purpose of the project and focus on Very Brief Advice. The training will cover: 

The intended outcome of the session is participants feeling increasing confidence in engaging with service users who smoke and to support stop smoking through signposting. 

Next Steps 

After completion of the two-hour training session, participants will be eligible to apply for grant funding to deliver smoking cessation activity in their communities, around positively engaging with service users who smoke and signposting them to appropriate information, advice and support. A further one-day training session will also be run for organisations who are delivering this work, whose frontline staff and volunteers would receive training to: 

Organisations funded for this work would be expected to agree to record and monitor referrals to smoking cessation support services, and (with permission of service users) to track outcomes. The aim of this is to help provide some basic monitoring data that can display impact.

We will provide further details of the grant opportunity seperately and how to apply. The amount of funding available will be £6,000 each for 10 organisations until February 2026.

Additionally, the project will be recruiting a pool of volunteers to participate in community engagement events in different localities across the city. This work would be aligned with Birmingham’s Vision for Volunteering and the Volunteering for Health Programme.   

Other programme outcomes include:    

Target Participants:  

The project aims to support targeted organisations working in communities / wards where deprivation is high and/or with specific cohort groups. The training will also be beneficial for organisations from the VCFSE delivering health and wellbeing services and those operating a workplace health and wellbeing agenda.  

Training Dates and Booking:  

The two-hour training session is available on the following dates:  

The follow-on one-day training sessions will take place in June or July, to be arranged with those attending them. All of the training sessions (other than those on 9th June where the venue is to be arranged) will be held at BVSC’s office, located at Latham House, 33-34 Paradise Street, Birmingham B1 2AJ. 

To book a place on to the programme, please complete the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HR3HVPJ.

If you have any queries around the training or the Smoking Cessation work, please contact us at [email protected]