Hospital stubs out smoking

By MARTIN JOHNSTON, health reporter

If you want a smoke at Auckland Hospital from Wednesday week you will have to brave the weather out on the street.

From October 1, the Auckland District Health Board is banning smoking on its grounds and in its buildings and vehicles, for patients, visitors, volunteers and staff.

The only partial exception is its mental health services, in which the policy will be introduced gradually as it is considered a more difficult area in which to apply a ban.

An Auckland Hospital client, liver transplant patient Gary Miller, yesterday expressed his dissatisfaction at the new policy.

"It sucks," he said.

The 41-year-old from Papakura had just savoured his third smoke of the day, his first cigarettes since before his operation last Tuesday.

He had shuffled barefoot in the rain and the wind to the smoker's gazebo outside the hospital, pushing a wheeled stand holding bottles connected to his body.

He doubted the ban would work and said people would try to smoke at the hospital entrance or would go down to the street.

"How are you going to tell everybody you can't smoke.

"What's next? Will they drag you off the street and arrest you for smoking? Do they want a riot?"

He said many people still smoked around the hospital's covered main entrance, but security guards occasionally herded them into the gazebo.

All 21 district health boards last April agreed to go smokefree, or substantially so, by World Smokefree Day next May. Smokers at the Auckland board's sites were forced into the wooden gazebos outside its hospitals in December.

Previously some smoked in doorways, at loading docks, in stairwells or in a smoking room at Auckland Hospital.

The director of nursing and midwifery, Taima Campbell, defended the tough new policy.

"Some people say it's a breach of human rights [to ban smoking], but 75 per cent of the population don't smoke.

"You don't smoke in malls and other public places indoors.

"The policy is not about stopping people smoking - they can smoke on the street - it's about promoting a smokefree workplace."

Asked if the policy would increase stress for patients already on edge from poor health, she said: "This is about managing people's addictions."

The organisation would offer help to patients and staff who wanted it.

Waitemata health board spokeswoman Caroline Mackersey said her organisation aimed to set up designated smoking areas in its grounds. "They will be pushed nearer and nearer to the boundaries and ultimately it will not be on the site at all."

Mental health was more difficult because involuntary patients who could not go out onto the street to smoke, she said. But psychiatric units overseas had gone smokefree and Waitemata ultimately expected to follow them.

The board hoped its grounds and facilities would be virtually smokefree by next May.

Mental Health Foundation chief executive Alison Taylor supported the Auckland board ban and said there was no need to tiptoe around mental health services, but lots of consultation was needed first.

Action on Smoking and Health chairman Dr Murray Laugesen welcomed the moves to restrict smoking as a huge step forward.

"The Department of Health did it in 1987. It's not so long ago that the Red Cross lady used to sell cigarettes at Auckland Hospital. Things have come a long way."

Researchers estimate that smoking kills more than 4000 people in New Zealand a year, and that passive smoking kills about 350.