SMOKING is banned in the grounds of all Gwent hospitals from today, the habit condemned as “not acceptable in a place of healing” by a public health chief.

Shelters where patients, visitors and staff could smoke at the area’s three main hospitals – the Royal Gwent, St Woolos and Nevill Hall – were ripped out to mark national No Smoking Day today.

These are the last three Aneurin Bevan Health Board sites to introduce a ban on smoking in the grounds.

Anyone wishing to light up will now be expected to do so beyond the boundaries.

Health bosses see the move in terms of a wider battle to reduce the impact of smoking on health, and talk of supporting patients and staff in giving up smoking if they wish.

Patients who smoke, and who require a stay in hospital in Gwent, are being offered the opportunity of support to give up, with treatments such as Nicotine Replacement Therapy, and staff are being offered the chance to attend smoking cessation classes in hospital time.

“Rather than enforcement and policing, we are talking about supporting people – the four-fifths of society who do not smoke – to have confidence to ask the one-fifth who do, ‘do you mind?’” said Dr Gill Richardson, the health board’s director of public health.

“We don’t have an issue with the smokers, that is their choice, but we do have an issue with where they smoke.

“Smoking is not allowed in rugby grounds, pubs and such places, and we are not being consistent if we allowit on hospital grounds. It is not acceptable in a place of healing.”

The policy is not proving popular with everyone, however.

Sadie Robinson, from Cwmbran, was having a cigarette outside the Royal Gwent Hospital’s A&E department as contractors arrived to remove the shelter there yesterday.

“Where are people going to go? There will be patients going downonto Cardiff Road for a cigarette, and that’s dangerous,”

she said.

“You can wait hours and hours in A&E, and it’s a stressful place for a lot of people.

It’s not right that there’s nowhere to go.”

‘Fair, but where do you go?’

REGULAR Nevill Hall Hospital user Jim Sharp, 70, of Llanvapley, supports the ban but is sympathetic to patients and staff who smoke, and believes there should be a dedicated area for them away from the main thoroughfare.

“The ban will reduce the cleaning bill for the authority but I am sympathetic towards long-term patients and staff who will have nowhere to smoke,” he said.

Don Chambers, 75, of Llanover Way, Abergavenny, also supports the ban, but cannot see how it can be enforced.

“I had an appointment at Nevill Hall this morning and saw a gentleman smoking outside the entrance, next to the nosmoking sign, which he paid no attention to,” he said.

‘I cut down for my baby and I’d like to give up’

VICTORIA Loveday, from Chepstow, cut down from smoking 20 cigarettes a day to “four or five” during her pregnancy.

Now, having given birth to daughter Amelia, she is determined to quit altogether, though she says she will find it difficult. “I cut right down and I’m thinking if I can do that, I can do the rest,” said the 24- year-old, a smoker since her mid-teens.

“I know the risks, but people don’t realise how hard it is to give up. I’d like some support, but there’s not much around in the Chepstow area.”

In Ringland and Bettws, Newport, midwives are running a trial project in which all pregnant women are referred to Stop Smoking Wales, the smoking cessation service, unless they opt out.

“We tell them anyway about the risks to themselves and their babies of smoking while pregnant, but this gives them the opportunity to do something about it with a support service,” said midwife Cath Norman.

More than 16,000 people contacted Stop Smoking Wales for help during 2010/11, with the 2,649 from Gwent the second highest number of Wales’ seven health board areas.

Almost two-thirds of the 1,294 people treated in Gwent in that year selfreported as having quit at four weeks, and 309 selfreported as remaining quit after a year.

EDITORIAL COMMENT: Smoke ban is there to protect

TODAY’S ban on smoking in the grounds of Gwent hospitals will no doubt be controversial in some quarters. It will certainly be unpopular with those who defend or promote the habit.

In our viewit is a ban that is long overdue.

The sight of sick people – and particularly pregnant women – huddled in smoking shelters outside hospitals has always struck us as somewhat bizarre.

The Aneurin Bevan Health Board’s director of public health says smoking is “not acceptable in a place of healing”. Wecould not agree more.

Hospitals are places where sick people are made better – not places that should indulge those who have one of the unhealthiest habits known to man.

There will no doubt be howls of anguish fromthose smokers who believe the ban is some kind of infringement of their human rights.

It isn’t. Smokers are not being banned fromsmoking. Filling their lungs with poison is their choice.

Smokers are within their rights to indulge in their habit. But it is not their right to impose their addiction on other people.

The ban – just like the ban on smoking in enclosed places – is about protecting the majority of people who do not want to be breathing in cigarette smoke when they enter or exit a hospital.