Overview

Among the 30 countries of the EU where some experts on SAFE could be identified (*), there were experts from 19 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and UK) that provided information of, at least a best practice for SAFE in their country.

The Section 2 of the online questionnaire on best practices for SAFE was completed by 32 experts out of 110 consulted (response rate 29%). Twelve experts coming from governments, other 12 working in NGOs, 3 experts from the university, 1 from a public research centre, another one from a public hospital and the remaining three experts did not explain their affiliation.

There were 43 practices reported, three of them were the same practice reported by different experts in the same country, making 41 practices. Other four practices could be qualified as smoking cessation, which gives a total 37 practices on SAFE to be presented in this report.

The number of SAFE practices presented by experts ranged from five practices informed by experts of Austria, four practices informed by experts in The Netherlands, three different practices informed by experts from Belgium, Denmark, Slovenia, two practices informed by experts from France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden and UK. Finally, the experts from Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta and Spain provided information on one SAFE practice each. (Table 1)

Thirty-five out of 37 practices (95%) are ongoing and two were already finalized.

Evaluation of the practices was carried out in 11 of the 37 practices

Scope of the practice

Most of the practices (23 out of 37, 62%) have a regulatory and policy making scope, followed by information awareness (18 out of 37, 49%) and being a tool (13 out of 37, 35%). Ten practices have the scope of being an action plan (27%), followed by guidelines, monitoring (22%), training (19%), service delivery (14%) and all health (8%). Only one practice has the scope of mobile health.

Type of tobacco or nicotine product objective of the practice

The type of product objective of the practice is mainly conventional tobacco, followed by e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products. Other devices that are currently appearing on the market (such as nicotine pouches, or flavour additives) were not explored in the consultation.

Best practice according to type of setting and tobacco/nicotine product

Table 1: Number of practices by type of setting and country