As a medical student, someone once told me that helping patients stop smoking was the single best intervention available to us as doctors. I’ve never found a reference for that, but it stuck with me.

While I might not have the evidence for my claim, we do know that each year, smoking-related disease costs the NHS £2.6 billion and causes up to 76,000 deaths. The good news is that rates of smoking are decreasing each year, with the latest figure at 12.9%.

Aside from the general health benefits of quitting, several specific perioperative outcomes exist.