COMMIT to Change: Tackling Smoking Inequalities in Gloucestershire for Gloucestershire County Council

While overall smoking rates continue to fall in the UK, we’re not all kicking the habit at the same pace. Among certain groups, including Polish communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with substance misuse issues, and those living in supported accommodation, rates remain disproportionately high.  

These communities experience greater health risks and face complex barriers to accessing support to cut down and quit. We partnered with Gloucestershire County Council to engage local communities and understand their experiences and relationships with smoking.   

To do this, we adopted a behaviourally informed, mixed-methods approach to understand the drivers behind smoking and quitting behaviours. We kicked off with a rapid literature review to map existing evidence, followed by extensive fieldwork: over 80 interviews, eight focus groups, and two targeted surveys. By grounding our approach in established behavioural science frameworks such as COM-B and the Transtheoretical Model, we were able to produce tailored behavioural diagnoses for each of the priority groups and their preferences.   

An exciting output of the work came in the creation of COMMIT – a bespoke, behaviourally informed engagement tool designed specifically for Gloucestershire. COMMIT provides a framework to guide commissioning, improve service accessibility and relevance. It includes a scoring matrix assessing service alignment with the needs of target groups, ensuring interventions are both evidence-based and people-centred. And to help embed the programme we delivered capacity building training and workshops, upskilling the Council to apply behavioural science principles every day.   

As we’ve seen across so many of our projects, the value of working hand-in-hand with communities and local partners is clear. The approach has helped guide Gloucestershire County Council’s commissioning decisions, campaigns and service planning, ensuring its delivery reflects the real-world needs of its population.