Current smokers in Ireland will collectively lose almost five million years of life and 2.5 million years of productivity, leading to healthcare costs of about €20.2 billion, according to research by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).
The study, conducted at the RCSI School of Population Health, also estimates that current smokers in Ireland will spend a combined 5.9 million years living with smoking-related chronic diseases such as COPD, lung cancer, stroke and heart disease.
The data used for the analysis was based on Irish population-level statistics for 2022, following smokers aged 15 to 85.
At an individual level, those most affected were 20-year-old males who smoke daily. This group is expected to “lose eight years of life, lose more than eight years of productivity and incur an additional €28,000 in healthcare costs over their lifetime compared to a non-smoker”.
READ MORE
Dr Gintare Valentelyte, lead author, said the study was the first to “provide evidence on the long-term outcomes and healthcare costs for the full smoking population in Ireland”.
The researchers describe their study as “timely” as it was completed ahead of a review of the current national tobacco control policy.
Tobacco Free Ireland was launched in October 2013 and aimed to reduce the nationwide smoking prevalence rate to less than 5 per cent by 2025.
“It is clear that this target will not be met,” the study notes.
Prof Frank Doyle, co-author of the research, said: “There is an urgent need to reinvigorate the national tobacco policy discourse and refocus policymakers on achieving this goal, as this research shows the costs of inaction both in lives lost and the billions of euros it will cost our health system and economy.”
In 2023, smoking prevalence in Ireland stalled at 18 per cent, with other European Union countries varying from 8 per cent in Sweden to 37 per cent in Bulgaria, the study notes.
Dr Paul Kavanagh, public health adviser to the Health Service Executive’s Tobacco Free Ireland Programme, said that despite some progress “smoking remains the greatest challenge facing population health in Ireland”.
He said there was “a need to strengthen proven measures like increasing tobacco taxation, accessible stop-smoking support and a new Tobacco Free Ireland plan to end the health, economic and wider social harms of smoking”.
This research was funded by the HSE Tobacco Free Ireland Programme, as part of a collaboration with RCSI’s School of Population Health. The study was also supported in part by a grant from Research Ireland.
