Supporting healthy, smokefree futures

Cheshire and Merseyside Women's Health and Maternity (WHaM) has been in successful in securing funding from Health Education England for 31 supported volunteer roles to form a new Health Inequalities Peer Support Service. Recruitment for the pilot is underway, and it will be developed in partnership with Koala North West who have many years’ experience of delivering peer support services.

Initial focus will be on supporting pregnant women who smoke, and will help to improve health behaviours among communities, through providing peer-led interventions.

Working with health professionals and other public and third sector organisations, as well as maintaining a focus on social support and empowering women through shared experiences, the service will look to help women who experience a range of vulnerabilities during pregnancy and the postnatal period, such as language barriers and difficulty accessing services.

The WHaM Smoking in Pregnancy (SiP) project team has also held training sessions to support Koala North West 'Little Lungs' Parent Champions and Cheshire and Merseyside Beyond Programme Parent Champions. It will aid the dissemination of key, effective SiP messaging in-line with the 'Making every contact count' and 'Very Brief Advice' approaches.

The training was very positively received and the champions have reported back that they have already been able to make use of the techniques they've learnt.

One champion shared the following details with our team: “My job for Alder hey is to protect and help to prevent children getting bronchiolitis. I explained to families following this training that a big preventative measure is to stop smoking, and the risk and effects it can have on not only children but on the whole family too. With this information one mum has already stopped smoking and is using vapes”.