As a smoker since 1968, I have, obviously, felt the NHS pressure heaped up over years and I have seen hospitals move from providing a bedside ashtray, to having a smoking room, to then allowing it in the toilets, to providing an outdoor area, and to finally total exclusion and punishment for those who still persist despite hospital mistreatment.
As Simon rightly says, like it or not, people often smoke to relieve stress, and let's face it, being in hospital for any length of time is enough to drive anyone mad unless they love the drama, the smells, the sheer bloody boredom of hospital wards. It's also a comfort to those visitors with family who may be in a very bad way and even dying.
Throwing smokers outside is cruel enough, but to force them out to unsafe areas where there may be heavy traffic, or danger from assault because of the sheer isolation of the places they are forced to go, is downright inhumane.
I wouldn't want to see smoking allowed back on wards, or in the toilets, but I have never seen the harm in having an enclosed smoking room for staff, patients and visitors where no one but smokers go.
I've always understood that these NHS smoking bans were to "help" smokers to quit and fair enough. It may have worked for some who wanted to stop smoking anyway but for those who have no intention of quitting, the extra restrictions have been used as a stick to beat them with at a time when they need the most care or compassion.
I still have that image in my head of a young mum who had given birth to a still-born baby. She was in a very bad way. She had just regained consciousness following a near death experience after the birth of her dead son. She was offered drugs "to make her feel better" but all she wanted for her grief was a smoke. They wouldn't allow her to hang out of the window in her own room, or use the window in the ensuite bathroom , and they chided her for wasting the "precious" time of nurses who had far better things to do than wheel her outside and stand there while she had the audacity to smoke.
The hospital had got rid of it's smoking room between the birth of my third and fourth child. As I stood outside on this freezing cold day, shivering in nightdress and slippers with fag in hand, this poor woman was wheeled out by a very impatient nurse who moaned she had a lot to do. The woman had blood bags attached to her arms. She looked like death, pale, and very sad. I could imagine how she was feeling but she got no sympathy from this hospital.
As she sat there, shivering and smoking and weeping silently, a priest turned up, sent by her worried parents who thought she needed the Last Rites. He was appalled by the cruelty shown to this woman who deserved compassion but the nurse was only concerned that he could now wheel her back in and she could escape the "filth" of dropped fag ends around her.
When NHS hatred of smoking patients moved up a notch, and they began to be blamed for the mess outside of hospital entrances where ashtrays were never provided, I used to wonder why the NHS had never forseen that this would happen. Now I think it did. By encouraging smokers to be "dirty" it could incite hatred against them. It heaps on the pressue and makes smokers feel ashamed. Its smoking policy is built around exclusion, isolation and mistreatment with the aim of bullying smokers to quit in the race to eradicate smoking from society once and for all.
The NHS never understood that such treatment only makes smokers not want to go to hospital at all. I certainly don't. I've always said that if I ever get seriously ill, the last place I should be taken is hospital. I will not spend my last hours being treated worse than a leper by staff who think I don't deserve to live, including those like Jane Almond Deville - the NHS anti-smoking nurse who said live on air that smokers "would just have die" if they had a serious condition but wouldn't stop.
I hope that whatever Party eventually ends up as the next government will take a serious look at this issue and how discrimination is being legalised against one minority group in all sorts of ways.
Hospital smoking bans make me sick and it was time they were reviewed.
