The Health of the Nation sets national targets for risk factor reduction. One of the resulting challenges is to develop local monitoring procedures to allow realistic local targets to be set, and evaluate progress towards achieving them. We report a survey of smoking prevalence in schoolchil dren using the setting of annual school nurse health interviews for secondary school pupils, Years 7 and 10. This type of initiative is a simple, reliable method for local monitoring of trends in smoking for this age group, and should aid targeting and evaluation of interventions to prevent smoking uptake.
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