About the National Smoking Cessation Institute
The Institute was established in 1991, primarily to develop some very special drug addiction treatment bequeathed to it by the late Dr Richard Mackarness, a consultant at Basingstoke District General Hospital.

We developed a programme, using the treatment (Addiction Neutralisation Therapy), and started to run clinics all around the country. Mostly, these were for our corporate clients who wanted our help for their employees. We called the programme NHA365.

Subsequently, we gave the programme a more commercial name, Phoenix (we loved the strapline - ‘a new life arising from the ashtray’), and increasingly provided it to the public. More than 11,000 smokers have been through the programme to date.

Over the years, we realised that some smokers were not suitable for Phoenix (for example, we have a minimum age of 25), and that there are some very good therapies that we could also provide. Mainly, we were concerned about hypnotherapy, which had a lot of promise but suffered from a lack of regulation and specialist professional training for therapists.

We converted to a co-operative in 2005. We are proud of our co-operative status - it makes a strong statement about our commitment to working both with and for the community, as part of that community ourselves. We work without profit.

Finally, why do we need to do all this? Why doesn’t the National Health service do it? The reason, sadly, is that the NHS is committed to its contractual arrangements with the pharmaceutical companies to use their products exclusively. Just as with, say a back problem you cannot get osteopathy on the NHS, so in smoking cessation if you want better treatment you will also need to go private.

Another reason is that the NHS does not do research in smoking cessation. In fact no one, incredibly, does any research. For this reason, we have a commitment to do as much research as our funding will allow, and to look unstintingly for better ways to help smokers.
Our mission statement, if we had one, would be to provide every smoker in the country with the help they need to stop smoking. It makes us quite unique, and that, actually, is something we are also proud of.