Chesterfield Royal Leads The Way
Chesterfield Royal Hospital has adopted the advice from the RCP & PHE and will allow vaping on its grounds
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by Dave Cross
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In “Hiding in plain sight: Treating tobacco dependency in the NHS”, the RCP argued: “Failing to provide help to quit smoking while delivering other similarly or less cost-effective interventions to smokers represents distributive injustice which both perpetuates and exacerbates health inequalities.”
The RCP believes: “We should allow e-cigarettes to be used on NHS sites to support smokers to remain smoke-free and help to sustain smoke-free policies.”
A month after the report, Western Trust, the Royal Free London and Milton Keynes University Hospital all announced that vaping was to be banned along with smoking.
POTV asked all three for a comment in relation to the RCP report but none replied.
Then, in November, the APPGV released the “Vaping in workplaces and public places” report, and Mark Pawsey MP made an impassioned plea for more NHS Trusts to allow vaping in order to encourage the reduction of tobacco-related harm. He urged them to consider the guidance from Public Health England.
The Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has taken this on board, and announced that vaping will be allowed on site as of today.
Sally Chadwick, lead nurse for policy change, said: “We’ve approached this from a smoking cessation point of view. Whilst the Trust would not encourage vaping as such, given its success in helping people to stop smoking, we are happy to allow it on site for those patients who are using vaping to help them give up cigarettes.”
“The guidance we have had from Public Health England is that it presents a much lower health risk than smoking and is proving useful to help smokers give up cigarettes. So, as long as it is done outside and away from doors and windows, we will now permit their use on site."
Chadwick added: “Helping people to quit smoking is a major part of the national and local health agenda and there is a portion of the recently published NHS Long Term Plan that is devoted to prevention, of which smoking cessation will play a major part. We are playing our part in following national guidelines to implement this plan as part of the collective drive towards promoting healthier lifestyle choices.”
“The popularity of e-cigarettes has grown significantly over the past few years and the research carried out by PHE has helped us to clarify our position on them in terms of health promotion.
“E-cigarettes are just one way that people can substitute the harmful effects of smoking. Other nicotine replacement therapies available on our inpatient wards include nicotine patches and we can also make referrals to our local stop smoking service who give on-going help to patients who wish to give up smoking.”
Resources:
- All Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping report on workplace and public space vaping - https://www.planetofthevapes.co.uk/news/vaping-news/2018-11-20_workplace-vaping-appg-report-launch.html
- “Hiding in Plain Sight” by the Royal College of Physicians - https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/hiding-plain-sight-treating-tobacco-dependency-nhs
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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