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Resistant and resilient smokers in Southwark
Wendy Rickard, Reader in Public Health, Institute of Primary Care and Public Health, London South Bank University
Abstract
Like other boroughs across the UK, Southwark Primary Care Trust is required to help people stop smoking. In 2005, its record on service up-take and the achievement of service targets was poor. Inequities in stop smoking service provision, access and take up were suspected. A small scale focus group study was undertaken to investigate why stop smoking services were not taken up or if used, not necessarily adhered to by young people (girls excluded from school), pregnant women and parents of young children, unemployed people and male manual workers. First we compared and contrasted how different groups described their smoking, mining themes such as growing, hiding, being bad or bored, staying the same, enjoying and being invulnerable. We then analysed what characterised people’s smoking resistance and resilience, which included concepts of risk taking and fatalism, doubting evidence and reliance on private stories, a focus on families /across generations and perceptions of services. Potential service changes were then imagined from within an anthropological focus (on shared values and meaning systems that embed the individual behaviour choices of members of a cultural group) and were used to inform a parallel equity audit that took place over the same period.
Biography
Wendy Rickard is a Reader in Public Health in the Institute of Primary Care and Public Health at London South Bank University. Part of her work has involved collaborative commissioned research on locally based primary health care in London on a range of public health topics. This mostly draws on participative research methods and relates to working with ‘hard to reach’ groups. Currently she is working with the British Library Sound Archive using narrative based methods on an HIV/AIDS Testimonies project. She has an interest in the innovative application of research from these sources for public health intervention in practice settings.
Wendy Rickard
Institute of Primary Care and Public Health,
Erlang House, 103 Borough Rd
London
SE1 0AA
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