MY ECLECTIC WORLD: The NHS and Smoking

Now it’s fairly well known that smoking tobacco is not actually that good for your health. Despite the protestations of ASH the evidence is still firmly on the side of the medics of the land (if not the world) and that is “Smoking Kills”.

So when we were on our way back from our regular constitution from the town to home we take a short cut through St Richard’s Hospital. Everywhere you look that are a couple of giant signs and a multitude of smaller one warning that smoking is not permitted in any building OR the grounds of the hospital. This I think is evident given the number of smokers that lurk on the very boundaries of the Hospital puffing their cancer sticks.

It was with some considerable surprise when only last week we noticed the number of patients and Staff (?) who seem intent upon defying the Health Authority edit and lurking around so many corners of the hospital. We have spotted numerous smokers actually smoking next to the "No Smoking” signs!! One woman complete with pyjamas and a rather fetching pink dressing gown left the maternity wing and sat down in the sun outside of the Dieticians office and lit up! Two other women came out from the hospitals specialist treatment area which is not far from the nearby cancer treatment facility and then, yes you’ve got it, lit up under the No Smoking sign right outside the doors. Finally, a young woman in a wheel chair was sitting outside an admin building (under another No Smoking sign) puffing away on a fag. Is there perhaps special dispensation for the wheelchair bound in terms of smoking?

We did wonder if the NHS/Hospital ought to be doing more to make sure that its orders were obeyed? Should there be “fines” levied?

I suppose some may argue that if they are terminally ill then smoking wont make any difference. I still think that the NHS should be doing more.

Now, My Quote of “Quotes of the week” (from the Mail on Sunday 11th April)

“Wooden-headed bureaucratic silliness combined with a well-meaning and completely misplaced anxiety about giving offence to non-Christians”

(Dr Rowan William, the Archbishop of Canterbury
responding to attacks on Christianity, highlighted by the case of a nurse wearing a crucifix on the wards)

My next blog will be about the crazy idea of giving votes to 16 year olds!!!