To be sick of seeing people smoking by no smoking signs by hospital entrances

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Usually one of these is an in-patient - in hospital gown, PJs or dressing gown. Plus has at least one of these a drip attached on a drip castor holder, catheter on a stand or on show and a nasal cannula around neck. They look very pale and weak whilst using what energy they have to clutch a cig in their hands.

Then see hospital staff. Both medical staff in uniform and other staff in normal clothes. Know that they are staff by lanyards, ID passes.

The former are probably in hospital due to smoking. The latter should lead a better example by walking outside the grounds to smoke.

Do you think the NHS and their trusts should do something about this?

Yes, especially when they are irresponsible, heavily pregnant women whom I have to pass on my way for my IVF treatment!

Yep. Tell me, why don’t you say something to them, asking them to stop as they’re right by the entrance and other people want to get by including kids??

Because at best they’ll ignore you, at worst start a mouthful of abuse potentially leading up to them hitting you.

Thats what the underpaid, minimum wage staff get. If we don’t let them out of the wards to smoke when they’re mobile we haven’t got a legal leg to stand on. If they’re not mobile or only just enough, needing taking to the entrance, they will get more and more nasty leading to aggression and other patients in the vicinity will start to get angry at bpth them and us, leading to conflicts.

We have maybe 3 or 4 security staff to cover the entire hospital who cannot therefore attend every incident of entitled boomer drug addicts bring angry and aggressive because staff won’t take them for their fix.

This is not what we’re here for. We are supposed to help people get well and people, especially the current generation, the baby boomers who take up most of our care, need to be a bit more appreciative and respectful. Even grateful. But public sector workers have been made into their slaves on minimum wage, lambasted for lazy unproductivity and WE HAVE NO RIGHTS.

If you won’t stop them for your child’s sake how are we supposed to? We’re no different from you.

YANBU.
When DD was a baby and being transferred from specialist hospital back to our local hospital following open heart surgery the ambulance pulled up to the main entrance to be meet with a crowd of selfish smokers and a fog of putrid smoke ! Transport nurse leapt out of the ambulance and told them all to clear off as they bringing out an extremely clinically vulnerable baby out of the ambulance !! She didn’t mess about and it was like the parting of the Red Sea !!

It absolutely infuriates me. My daughter gets respiratory infections really badly and needs admitted to get oxygen. At the tail end of the admission we are encouraged to get her outside and moving around, and every time I have to push her in pram past multiple smokers beside the signs prohibiting smoking. In Scotland it is law not to smoke in the grounds of the hospital and they can give out fines. Despite many complaints to the hospital, health board and my local MSP it still happens, there excuse is that they do not have the budget to enforce the ban.

No one is asking them to give up just walk ten paces further.

The hospital I work at is a no smoking zone, but there is always patients (and staff) outside smoking. They do go away from the entrance to the ‘vaping’ huts but unless the hospital hires people to stand around the area all day making sure no one smokes, it won’t stop.

I’ve had to tell more than a few patients to stop vaping on the wards!

Smokers? They won’t.

The kind of entitled dementia baby boomer who smokes will simply assume their rights to ruin everyone else’s life with the full backing of the state: ‘person-centred care’ ideology, while needed sometimes, clearly falls down here. Do you not know what these people are like? This is not about polite middle class professionals. Ditto for either the extremely rich successful male who still wants to smoke or the benefits brigade who get everything given to them on a plate and still think they deserve more.

And what @ProsperoBloom said, with bells on.

Are you going to pay more tax so that we can have some more minimum wage security guards at every entrance (they’d need two at each one)?

Cigarette smoke triggers days if not week long migraines for me. It can rend me completely useless, feeling sick and dizzy with visual disturbances. Makes being a single parent carer extremely difficult.

My son is autistic and non-compliant with many procedures such as dental or opthamological, so we spend an awful lot of time at the hospital where there are more resources and provisions and appointments can be split or extended. He also has MCAS, which can be triggered by cigarette smoke and aerosols.

His entire body flares up in hives and the obsession over scratching lasts days, causes sleepless nights and self injurious behaviours.

When people think about the harm of second hand smoke they probably only think it is a bit of wheezing, a fleeting moment that means it probably won't be doing much harm, that there's more pollution in the air from traffic and industry, what's the harm, but nobody ever thinks about anything else.

Smoke if you want to, by all means, just do it away from the bloody doors.

What? Visitors outside the maternity unit are enjoying their final cigarette? I don't think so. Get away from the doors and windows, that's all people are asking.

I don't really care if they're stressed or what's going on, it's still selfish to force others to breathe in smoke just walking in and out of buildings.

It must be impossible for you to be anywhere in public with all that.

Presumably it could come out of the £8.5 billion in taxes smokers already pay?

Your language here is extremely ageist, with a side-serving of benefits bashing. As for dementia - if a person has dementia they might not even understand 'no smoking' signage.

This

I was in hospital for five weeks and the smoking area was where all the 'no smoking signs' were. Like in every hospital I've ever been to basically.

I asked the nurses why they had the signs when everyone smokes there, and they said the signs aren't for patients, only staff!?

I often wondered why you don't see doctors or nurses smoking there. Presumably they have a secret area or they must fully leave the hospital site.

I can't begrudge a terminally sick person having a cigarette. The staff should at least have a designated area so they can't be seen.

To where, though, if there is no designated smoking space? This is about managing behaviours - if the entire hospital grounds are 'no smoking' and someone makes the decision to smoke anyway, they might as well smoke illicitly in the door area as ten paces away, because it's equally 'not allowed' and it's more sheltered from the elements.

Put a smoking area/shelter ten paces away and people will use it.

As it should be. Using tax incentives to improve the health of a nation is a great idea. But the fact is, if everyone stopped tomorrow there would be a net black hole in the budget of about £6 billion and nobody has ever wondered how that would be filled.

Most hospitals have security staff, so why aren't they enforcing the no smoking policy?

At my son's Uni, there was a campus-wide no smoking policy which was enforced by the campus security staff very strictly indeed, even in the open air parts of the campus, and the security staff weren't just "policing" the students, the rule applied to visitors too who were likewise "reminded" firmly by security staff not to smoke!

Smokers are selfish sods. On visiting a supermarket yesterday, there is a small canopy at the entrance. Smokers stand there and smoke as it rained. The smoke wafted through the shop. Manager and a security guard asked the smokers to move. They got abuse.

There are more recourse options for university students and their visitors - the student could be subjected to disciplinary sanctions - so there is a threat that can be used for enforcement.

No such threat applies to hospital patients and visitors. Much as they might want to, they can't throw a patient out while they are undergoing treatment. In England and Wales it is not illegal to smoke out of doors. Breach of a hospital's outdoor smoking policy would be purely a civil matter, so the police wouldn't be interested, and the cost of pursuing civil litigation that would be on very shaky grounds to begin with would not be worth it.

My sister died of a brain tumour. She was a smoker years before but had given it up. She started again when she was dying (in hospice). I wheeled her down to the entrance and bought her cigarettes etc. She would usually be keen for someone to visit and do this for her. I would put my coat over her as she was in her nightie and she’d puff away. She lived on chocolate by that point too (they put you on steroids so the hunger is extreme).
She went from healthy to dead in 7 months. She was really sporty and a vegetarian. She died one day after her 51st birthday.
Stop judging because you don’t know other people’s stories.

Oh and she used to smoke in bed in the hospice. They’d tell her off. “What are you going to do? Expel me?” she’d laugh.

The hospital I work at has dedicated, covered smoking shelters. Everyone still smokes by the no smoking signs at the main entrance. The entrance to the big children's hospital I routinely take my disabled child (who has chronic respiratory problems) to is also full of people smoking. If dedicated smoking shelters and sick kids don't put people off smoking, the signs aren't going to.

Yabu - smoking is addictive. Few people want to be standing outside in all weathers, sometimes when they are seriously ill, having a cigarette. If they could break the addiction, they would.
Hospitsl trusts can't enforce no smoking outside rules because they know full well that it is an addiction - patients are already under greater stress because they are ill and that's not the time to force them to give up smoking.
As for staff, they are paid for their time but the nhs does not own them. If they smoke, that's their own concern and I doubt the nhs can afford to alienate staff by banning it totally from the site.
Personally I don't want my dr or nurse unable to focus at work because they are craving a cigarette

Id be surprised if any hospitals have shelters given you're not meant to smoke on site, on the grounds at all? Most NHS trusts have signed up to this.