Smoking rates in the North-East have fallen faster in the past decade than in any part of England. On national No Smoking Day, Ailsa Rutter, director of Fresh: Smoke Free North-East, talks to Barry Nelson about the campaign and about her father, who died from a smoking-related disease

FROM an early age Ailsa Rutter was interested in nursing. “I remember reading fictional stories about nursing when I was little,” she says. She had a happy childhood in Seahouses on the Northumberland coast, with her dad, Stewart, mum, Margaret, and sister, Sallyanne, and teachers at her school in Alnwick advised her to aim high and study nursing as part of a university degree. “That turned out to be very good advice,” she says.

After she qualified, Ailsa chose to specialise in nursing heart patients in Australia where she was confronted with the fact that the cardiac patients she was seeing were suffering from preventable, often smoking-related disease.

She became increasingly driven to do something about reducing smoking rates, and the ambitious Northumbrian nurse was in the right place at the right time. In the mid-1990s, the Australians were about to take a leading role in tobacco control.

After completing a full-time master’s degree in public health, supporting herself by working at weekends, Ailsa landed the job as manager of the Queensland Quit Campaign, a major public health initiative.

“Australia has been a world leader of tobacco control, including screening some of the most gruesome TV ads I have ever seen. I worked for two years on that job, which inspired me and turned out to be a great launchpad,” she says.

In December this year plain packaging of tobacco products will be introduced in Australia and Ailsa hopes the initiative will be introduced in the UK. “After all, the tobacco industry spends many millions advertising their products and trying to recruit young new smokers,” she says.

It was at this point that fate intervened.

“My job was going really well in Queensland when my dad was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a serious respiratory disease.”

Strongly associated with smoking, COPD occurs when the internal structures of the lung become so damaged that they are unable to function properly. Breathing becomes increasingly difficult and the condition can be fatal.

“I didn’t know how ill he was going to be but I made the decision to go back to England straight away, even though I didn’t have a job.”

Luckily, her sister spotted a job ad for manager of Gateshead and South Tyneside Stop Smoking Services and after an interview via satellite link Ailsa secured the job. “The link had a tensecond delay… it was quite comical,” she remembers.

Ailsa came back from Australia in May 2000.

It was just as well.

Her father’s health deteriorated in the late summer of 2001 and he died in hospital just before Christmas 2001. “We have just had the tenth anniversary of his death,” says Ailsa.

“I was devastated. He was a fit, strong man, a self-employed joiner who had also been Northumberland county golf club champion, but he had been a smoker since he was about 14.

He stopped before he died, but the damage had been done.”

Stewart Rutter was only 61 when he died. His death, from a preventable disease, filled Ailsa with a steely determination to do all she could to prevent other families suffering the same needless loss. “Both my mum and dad have been hugely supportive and were really proud of what I was doing,” she says.

The fact that her own father was a smoker for most of his life underlines Ailsa’s point that she is always anti-smoking, but never anti-smoker.

“I totally appreciate that, for most smokers, it is a childhood addiction. They get hooked when they are kids and never think that something like COPD or lung cancer will happen to them.

They think they are invincible,” says Ailsa.

“When my dad was young, a lot of people didn’t know the health risks. There was massive marketing going on and most people smoked.”

That’s why, as director of the UK’s first tobacco control office since 2005, Ailsa feels so strongly that we have to do all we can to help smokers to stop and – even more importantly – prevent new generations getting hooked on tobacco.

When the first steps were taken towards setting up a North-East regional tobacco control office in 2004, Ailsa applied for and got the position of regional tobacco policy manager. Because she had a young child at the time, she initially jobshared.

Fresh, which has now earned an enviable international reputation, was launched in May 2005 at a “visionary” conference in December 2004 in Gateshead attended by more than 180 key people from the NHS and local authorities and addressed by internationally known figures in tobacco control.

“That conference was a kind of rallying call.

There was a strong sense that we were no longer happy to have the worst smoking rates in the country,” she recalls.

SINCE the Chester-le-Street-based campaign group was launched, it has been behind a series of major campaigns, from supporting the workplace ban to encourage smokers to give up to highlighting the dangers posed by black market tobacco. Poignantly for Ailsa, one Fresh campaign aimed to raise public awareness of the links between smoking and COPD.

The impact Fresh has had on the region’s smoking habits is remarkable. Statistics show that since 2005, the North-East has seen the biggest fall in smoking anywhere in England.

“We had the highest rate in England, with 29 per cent of adults smoking regularly. The latest figure is just 22 per cent, which is pretty brilliant,” she says.

Ailsa, 40, knows that not everyone is happy about efforts to curb smoking – she has been on the receiving end of unpleasantness – but makes no apologies for the crusade she is leading.

“I think we have great support in the North- East and the progress we have achieved is through true partnership,” she says. “I think there is a real sense that smoking can and should become a thing of the past. It might take 30 years, but I do believe it can happen.”

• For help on quitting call 0800-022-4332 or go to smokefree.nhs.uk