Care Opinion

Day Surgery entrance - patients smoking

Posted By elsatoscarobbie

"Day Surgery entrance - patients smoking"

About: University Hospital Hairmyres

(as a service user),

I have to attend regularly for chemotherapy at the Day Unit and have used the Day Surgery entrance to access the main building to go to the clinic. I am disgusted at the state of the entrance with cigarette ends and even cigarette packets. These are lying about outside and even inside the doorway. As the staff aren't allowed to smoke in the grounds I assume this mess is made by patients and visitors. How inconsiderate of them to leave these behind when there are bins available. I regularly see people either standing there or sitting in their wheelchairs. I am undergoing treatment and don't feel its right for me or anyone else to have to walk through that entering a hospital. I don't have to put up with that going out now or in my own home so object to it at a hospital. I attended the Beatson in Glasgow a few years ago and there was a similar problem there with patients smoking at the doorway. I know the idea is to discourage them but could you even put up a screen for them to go behind as obviously they aren't going to stop smoking despite the hospital ban!

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Responses

Response from Joanne Edwards, Director of Hospital Services, University Hospital Hairmyres, NHS Lanarkshire 7 years ago
Joanne Edwards
Director of Hospital Services, University Hospital Hairmyres,
NHS Lanarkshire

Submitted on 01/09/2017 at 07:13
Published on Care Opinion at 10:48

picture of Joanne Edwards

Dear elsatoscarobbie,

I am so sorry for your experience when entering the hospital to attend for your treatment.

I share your frustration. Enforcing the No smoking policy remains a challenge for us and I hope that Scottish Government legislation will help us enforce this in the future. For the moment, we have increased our signs and notices and staff are encouraged to challenge members of the public smoking in hospital grounds. We are doing our best to tackle this issue and are trying to spread the message which you can read about in a blog we published previously: https://www.careopinion.org.uk/blogposts/372/smoke-free-grounds

Unfortunately, we do not have enough staff to police all of the entrances all of the time. It is everyone’s responsibility to challenge people smoking on hospital grounds and we hope that our continued efforts and public awareness campaigns will help us achieve smoke free grounds.

I’m glad you took the time to share your experience. Feedback like yours helps as it raises awareness with the public which we hope will help us to change people’s attitude and behaviour to smoking on hospital grounds.

Thank you for getting in touch.

Kind regards

Joanne

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