Smoking

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:32 pm on 28 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:32, 28 January 2020

Llywydd, I thank Angela Burns for those supplementary questions. She is right that there is a continuing challenge to reduce the proportion of young women who become pregnant and who carry on smoking. The figures have to be treated with just a small degree of caution, because the percentage is a factor of the fact that the number of teenage pregnancies has fallen so rapidly during the devolution era. So, in the year 2000, there were 495 young women under the age of 16 who became pregnant in Wales, and in 2017, the last year for which we have figures, it was down to 144. And that's a dramatic decline. And amongst the 144, there is a concentration of young people who have particular difficulties and challenges, then, in persuading people to give up smoking.

But the range of services that are there in the NHS are designed to try and make sure that there isn't just one approach. In-hospital services work very well for some young people, but other young people definitely, we know, prefer to use pharmacy-based services, partly because it can be more anonymous; you'd rather go where you weren't so visible to other people. Specially trained midwives have a very important part to play in working with young people in particular, and then working directly with young people is important as well. So, in Pembrokeshire, in the Member's own area, Hywel Dda is doing a particular piece of work with young people who are smokers, trying to learn from them about the things that they would find most effective as forms of intervention to enable them to give up smoking, and that work is going on alongside primary care clusters and specialist midwives.