HOSPITAL bosses have yet to decide whether to put up smoking shelters despite winning council permission for them.

An Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust boss said it is consulting with NHS leaders over whether to put up the five shelters.

It last year won Oxford City Council planning permission for the shelters despite concerns from some health professionals.

Smoking was banned in trust hospital grounds in 2007 but managers said this has not been “practical or enforceable”.

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There is permission for a shelter at Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital, three at the Churchill Hospital and one at the Nuffield Ortho-paedic Centre.

Director of development and the estate Mark Trumper said: “We are consulting with other parties across the NHS and we are considering options.

“Those options include putting up areas for smoking for patients and their visitors but not for staff. We are not considering allowing staff to smoke.”

He told last week’s trust annual meeting: “We are not legally able to prevent people from smoking outside on our sites. We don’t have the same status as an airport. The ability for us to enforce a non-smoking policy is legally very difficult to administer. We are working to try and find a balance but the current situation is not helpful.”

He added that it would “lack compassion” to tell a smoker who might have received some bad news to put out their cigarette.

Mr Trumper – speaking during the NHS Stoptober campaign to help people quit – said: “We remain absolutely committed to offering smoking cessation services for patients while they are in our hospitals.”

County director of public health Dr Jonathan McWilliam and the GP-led Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, which makes NHS funding decisions, objected to the shelters last year. They said: “The NHS will be seen as condoning smoking and appeasing smokers rather than putting all efforts into helping people to give up.

“The public expect to see health promoting leadership from the NHS, not action to make it more convenient to smoke on NHS land.”

Oxfordshire County Council’s Hilary Hibbert-Biles, cabinet member for public health, said: “I personally don’t think that the trust should encourage anybody to smoke and putting up smoking shelters, to me, encourages people to be able to smoke.”

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance says hospitals should be “smoke-free”.

A spokesman for NHS England said it was a matter for each individual trust to decide.


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