Another hospital ban to be lifted
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 BBC Radio Solent wants me to talk about a story in today's (Bournemouth) Daily Echo. The paper reports that a smoking ban is set to be lifted at the Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals. Karen Allman, director of human resources, told the NHS trust’s board:
“Smoking is not allowed on site. Unfortunately it has been driven underground.
“We’ve had instances of patients smoking under the bedclothes.
“We’ve had instances where fire tenders have been called out and staff have been running around pouring jugs of water on small fires.
“I’m aware of one trust where a patient died because he lit up a cigarette. He was on oxygen and went up in flames.”
Full story HERE.
I have blogged about hospitals and smoking bans before. See
Hospital: no smoking policy reversed and Smoking: hospital rebellion grows.
Note, though, that even when hospitals are forced to reconsider unworkable smoking bans, the authorities are still determined to wield a stick rather than a carrot. In Bournemouth, for example:
[The board will] consider whether the seats outside the front of the hospital should be removed to reinforce the message that smoking would not be tolerated in the area.
The good news is: these outdoor bans just aren't working. As we've always said, prohibit something and you drive it underground where you have no control.
Perhaps the message is getting through.
Reader Comments (4)
I remember many years ago noticing that the row of park-bench type seats outside the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead had been removed. I thought then and still do that this was a very cruel thing to do. If any doctors had a part in that decision then I wonder how they reconciled it with their oath, in whatever form they observe it, to do no harm. Of course the seats may have been restored now. I wouldn't know.
Maybe this is a sign of things to come. If I remember rightly, hospitals were amongst the first establishments to ban smoking, some years before legislation demanded it. Offices swiftly followed suit, then quite a few restaurants, then the majority of coffeeshops and, lastly, a handful of pubs and bars.
And, if my memory also serves me correctly, it was (again pre-ban) hospitals themselves who first re-instated inside smoking rooms (because it was deemed to be too risky for sometimes seriously-ill patients to be struggling outside and the staff disliked having to treat them so shabbily); then, gradually, office smoking rooms sprang up again in many large organisations (because of the bad PR created by crowds of smokers in the street outside the main entrances, about which the companies could do nothing); then many of the non-smoking restaurants, tired of complaints from their smoking customers, began to permit smoking in bar areas, or to allocate some smoking tables - and many of the coffeeshops (the vile Starbucks excepted) did the same. And lastly, all but a very, very few of the voluntarily non-smoking pubs welcomed smokers back into at least some areas of the bar, fed up with waiting for the droves of non-smokers who failed to materialise and fed up, too, with seeing crowds of customers - both the smoking and non-smoking variety - eschewing their establishments in favour of those who allowed people to smoke.
Of course, until such a time as the Health Act is amended or the ban repealed, there is no longer any possibility for such establishments to exercise their right to permit smokers inside their buildings, but perhaps this is a sign that, like dominoes, those first to embrace the ban so wholeheartedly are also the first to realise the shortcomings of such draconian regulations and, again like dominoes, perhaps we may see other types of establishments coming to their senses, in exact reverse order, just like before.
Misty says it all, except that there is a very big uncertainty about whether or not hospitals etc have any right at all to ban smoking IN THE FRESH AIR. The smoking ban law requires them to forbid smoking INSIDE the premises, but does not grant them the right to forbid smoking OUTSIDE the premises. What you do some five or six feet above the ground (fag in mouth) is no more relevent to hospital authorities than birds flying around and shitting here and there. Be wary of the reasons that this hospital is stating for its apparent 'volte face' - the fact of the matter is that they had no right to try to stop people smoking outside in the first place. What is significant is the recognition that people in hospital who are, in effect, dying have nothing to lose. The idea of taking them to court and fining them is too ridiculous for words - not that these arseholes have probably not thought about it (sue the estate of the deceased?).
I thought that it was well known that NHS Trusts do NOT have the power to 'ban' smoking in the open air of publicly owned buildings.
The Trust may be able to enforce their 'policy' on contracted members of staff. But they have no jurisdiction over , patients or visitors .
The NHS Trusts CANNOT enforce a no smoking policy and can only 'request' that outdoor smoking be stopped.