It has been revealed that nearly half of women who give up smoking during their pregnancies start again soon after they give birth and Public Health England says more action is needed to help mothers-to-be quit for good. 
According to research in the journal Addiction, an analysis of several studies suggests that 13% of women who enrol on smoking cessation programmes quit during pregnancy. But 43% of these restart within six months of giving birth, the BBC reported.
Smoking while pregnant has been linked to many health problems including premature births, miscarriages, stillbirths and sudden infant deaths.
One of the surest ways to quit smoking is with clinical hypnotherapy and the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) has highly-trained and qualified therapists on its register able to help people break the habit.
For the latest research, scientists from the universities of Nottingham and York looked specifically at the success of women who used smoking cessation services to help them quit.
They pulled together several international trials, including some from the UK, involving almost 1,000 women who took part in stop smoking programmes between 1989 and 2014. They found only a minority of women who tried to quit smoking succeeded.
But official figures for England published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that 11% of pregnant women were recorded as smokers at the time of giving birth in 2014-15, a steady decline from 15% in 2007.
While it is not stated what smoking cessation methods were used, hypnotherapy has been proven to be highly successful with research showing that a smoker is three times more likely to end the habit through hypnotherapy than is nicotine patches were used.
The NCH also says that the physical addiction to cigarettes can be over after just one session with a therapist.
Clinical hypnotherapy is evidence-based therapy, with over 70,000 research references worldwide, which requires that the client is committed to change and prepared to make the effort to make that change a reality.
Simply put, the therapist works with the subconscious, bypassing the critical mind and getting to the root of the issue. This can achieve rapid and last results without any other intervention.
Stress and anxiety, often felt by mothers as a result of child birth, can also lead to smoking if the habit has not been properly broken.
Hypnotherapy can deal with these problems too as the therapist, in the initial session, will take a detailed history from the client to establish the reasons behind the habit.
Prof Jonathan Grigg of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, told the BBC that the findings of the study were a worrying sign for the state of child health.
He added: “We need to fully support parents in the first few months with their baby to highlight to them the importance of keeping their home smoke-free.”
And Rosanna O’Connor, at Public Health England, said: “While the rate of women smoking during pregnancy continues to fall, further action is needed to support those who find it more difficult to stop and to help those who do stop, to stop smoking forever.
“It is vital to protect babies from smoke during pregnancy and in the early months of life. The best protection for mothers, their babies and partners is to quit smoking for good.”