Latest news

Single-use vapes are now banned from the shelves of all shops (from Sunday 1 June) thanks to a government blitz on sale and supply.The new crackdown makes it illegal to sell single-use vapes at corner shops and supermarkets, putting an end to their alarming rise in school playgrounds and the avalanche of rubbish flooding the nation’s streets.The government's announcement of its intention to ban the use of disposable vapes has already had real effects – with retailers and consumers shifting away from environmentally destructive single-use options.

With the landmark Tobacco and Vapes Billentering its final stages in Parliament, and just days before World No Tobacco Day (31 May)and the nationwide ban on disposable vapes (1 June 2025), NEW polling[1] from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) reveals overwhelming public support for a bold smokefree future – with voters urging the Government to go further and faster.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has put out a reminder for healthcare professionals and patients with asthma that overuse of blue inhalers (short-acting beta 2 agonists or SABAs), without use of a preventer inhaler, may lead to worsening symptoms or serious asthma attacks.These reminders follow updates to product information and the NICE - National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance for SABAs.The advice for healthcare professionals is:

The Primary Care Respiratory Society (PCRS) and Asthma + Lung UK call for urgent action to address the growing number of online pharmacies selling salbutamol inhalers without appropriate medical oversight. This practice not only undermines safe prescribing but also poses serious risks to public health. 

The start of a new year is an ideal time to support people to consider small ways to begin working towards a healthy lifestyle. Grand gestures are unlikely to be sustainable long term but taking small steps towards a longer term goal can help to improve or maintain their lung health and encourage patients to take further steps along the road.Here are our top five primary care resolutions for 2025 to encourage and support patients to improve or protect their lung health.

New BTS/NICE/SIGN Guideline on Asthma: diagnosis, monitoring and chronic asthma management 2024Today (27th November) the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), British Thoracic Society (BTS) and Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) publish their long-awaited single guideline on asthma diagnosis, monitoring and management.

We are pleased to mark World COPD Day with an introductory webinar on the new COPD risk slider*. We are also highlighting our COPD resources including animations, position statement and podcasts.

Maintenance and reliever therapy (MART) is a combined treatment system for asthma where a single, combined inhaler is used for both maintenance and reliever purposes, instead of having separate preventer (brown) and reliever (blue) inhalers.This system has many benefits such as reducing inflammation in the lungs, as well as providing quick relief from severe asthma symptoms, reducing asthma attacks and hospital admissions due to asthma, reducing prescription costs and it's better for the environment!

Following Darush Attar-Zadeh’s tobacco dependency article in PCRS’s Spring/Summer edition of Primary Care Respiratory Update, his 16-year-old daughter, Sophia Attar-Zadeh took it upon herself to write a blog on vaping providing a ‘first-hand account’ of how an increased number of children and young people have been drawn to it since the covid 19 pandemic.  This blog will explore my personal experience and view on the rapid growth of vapes around the city of London as a 16-year-old girl.

Vaping is now a familiar sight in everyday life. With increased awareness of the dangers of smoking, vaping can, with appropriate support, be an effective tool to help people to quit.However, as vapes have become increasingly accessible, a growing number of children and young people are now turning to vaping and experiencing unnecessary nicotine addiction which is not linked to tobacco dependency.School teachers are reporting on increased in-school absenteeism where students are vaping instead of attending class.