EXTRA support staff will be deployed to advise smokers against lighting up in hospital grounds after staff and patients were spotted puffing away just days after new rules were introduced.Alert! Smokers have been spotted in the vicinity, release the hounds!
And, erm, extra staff? Don't people working in the NHS keep telling us they've got no money and the whole institution is falling apart at the seams?
Professor Alison McCallum, director of public health and health policy at NHS Lothian, said: “We are grateful to the Evening News for highlighting this, enabling us to bring in additional support such as increasing the number of smoking cessation advisers and deploying in these areas over the coming days and weeks."Oh I see. So they were totally skint until the Evening News told them that smokers were in the car park, at which point the magic money tree began pumping out £20 notes. Or, as is more likely, are funds being diverted from healthcare for the purposes of a pointless witch hunt?
Alison Johnstone, Lothian Green MSP, said: “The ban on smoking at NHS hospitals hardly needs explain[ing], it’s there for a reason ...No, Alison, it does need explaining because it is not illegal (yet) to smoke outdoors, simply for the reason that there is no conceivable health threat. You do remember, don't you, that smoking was banned indoors because of the danger of mythical passive smoking from a series of {cough}thorough peer-reviewed studies? You're a politician, you surely must remember when bar staff were all of a sudden the most precious people in the nation ... for at least a few months until they were completely forgotten again.
So what reason, exactly, is there for banning smoking in the open air?
“Anyone visiting a hospital, be it staff, patient or visitor, shouldn’t have to pass through a haze of cigarette smoke on their way inside.”Simple. Place smoking shelters away from entrances and smokers will use them. Problem solved. You're a clever girl, you can work that out for yourself, can't you?
The move – which has been introduced as part of plan to create a tobacco-free generation by 2034 – also bans patients and staff from smoking in their cars on hospital property.For the education of any bemused alien life forms who might be scanning our internet, these are cars which are allowed on NHS property.
And this is a cigarette - which is banned for polluting the lungs of hospital visitors - being smoked ... in a car. I've highlighted it in red in case you can't see it.
Turn the spaceships round, fellas, we're not worth conquering, believe me.
But it's fitting to leave the last word to the architect of this bonanza of astonishingly mean-spirited and malicious pecksniffery north of the border.
[Sheila Duffy, chief executive of health charity ASH Scotland] said: “We want people to understand why the policy is there in the first place. At the moment, seeing smokers is a part of life but that is changing."Got that smokers? The policy is to make sure no-one ever has to see you. So go home, place a bell outside your door, and let's hope society can forget your sorry existence.
Or, as one commenter to the article put it ...
Clearly a polite request approach isn't working and if the health board isn't prepared to enforce it then they may as well say that all smokers are welcome.Heaven forbid that smokers - who have paid taxes to pay for the NHS just like everyone else, plus £12bn per year in duty over and above that - should ever be welcome at a hospital, eh?
Truly these people disgust me, may God rot every last one of them.
17 comments:
very good article, and those 2 photos are worth a thousand words. Clearly the people from public health Scotland have gone completely batshit crazy.
Excellent article.
“We want people to understand why the policy is there in the first place. At the moment, seeing smokers is a part of life but that is changing.”
Yep, there’s now no hiding the social-engineering intent.
It may come as a surprise to at least some that this prohibitionism was entirely unacceptable – even in America – up to the 1980s. The current crop of prohibitionists, starting with the “Godberites”, were very careful to masquerade the prohibition intent recognizing its unacceptability, claiming that smoking bans were only proposed to protect nonsmokers from the [concocted] “hazards” of secondary smoke. That's a lie that's been told many times over during the last few decades.
Who decided that smoking should be denormalized/eradicated? Who decided that antismoking should be a societal ideal? Well, someone decided because these weren’t the “ideal” a few decades ago. Through years of State-sponsored propaganda, prohibitionism, until recently viewed as repugnant and at odds with a relatively free society, has been normalized. Misocapny is now viewed as “normal”; “prohibition speak” is viewed as “normal”.
We can be sure that McCallum, Johnstone, and Duffy are clueless as to the history of antismoking and prohibition. They are simply parrots for the deranged “cause”.
It’s misocapny and the perverse Public Health framework that legitimizes it through an incessant fear and hate-mongering that are in urgent need
of denormalization. They comprise neurotic, bigoted megalomaniacs masquerading as “moral superiors”.
McCallum, Johnstone, and Sheila Scruffy - some of the "moral superiors".
Not surprising.
They should repeal the ban and allow designated smoking areas. Then they can dedicate the funds used to persecute smokers and pay the Smoking Stasi (or is the Gestapo?) to actual health care instead of social control.
I had no need for hospitals myself, until the smoking ban! Since the ban I have needed emergency care 4 times, which included paramedics!
Prior to this my association with hospitals was being with or visiting very sick relatives. When people you love are dying and losing their dignity with it, it is extremely stressful, hence the need for a smoker to smoke!
Even if being at a hospital with a loved one who is undergoing tests or procedures to find out what is wrong and to rule out or confirm cancer, there is a need for a smoker to smoke.
We certainly DO NOT need the health stasis to compound our stress and anxiety with these disgusting and inhumane policies.
Even their crazy talk about smokers taking longer to heal or recover is a load of bull! Smokers will take longer to recover if not allowed to smoke, simply because they are stressed and/or anxious. There ridiculous interference is actually hindering the recovery of patients and costing the NHS a bloody lot more than if they just let us be!
As for banning smoking in OUR cars whilst on their property, they can stick it! Just as people have said should the government bring in a total ban on smoking in cars, then 'they' pay for the car and ALL the associated costs with running it, they can dictate what we do in it. Until then they can whistle! It costs drivers a small fortune to run and maintain a vehicle, much of which is taxes going to government, so I believe if we are paying through the nose to have something that is, for most people, a necessary part of life and work, then they have NO RIGHT to dictate whether or not we can smoke in it!
Hopefully, in this instance, there will be a load of REAL SCOTS who will stand up against this pointless and extremely harmful regime! Or has everyone forgotten the nurse who was murdered, just after the ban came into effect, because she had to leave the hospital premises to have a smoke?
Major printing error on the sign she's holding. That 'WWF' should read 'WTF?'.
Or has everyone forgotten the nurse who was murdered, just after the ban
came into effect, because she had to leave the hospital premises to
have a smoke?
That's just acceptable collateral damage, Lyn. The most important thing is to denormalise smoking. And anyway, she was only a filthy smoker, so no great loss.
That is exactly the problem, whereas the ones that are really worth nothing and are filthy liars for filthy money are the ones that are persecuting us!
That's just acceptable collateral damage, Lyn. The most important thing is to denormalise smoking. And anyway, she was only a filthy smoker, so no great loss.
See, when you put it that way, the whole anti-smoker/smoking programme doesn't sound so caring and beneficent and everso-everso-fucking-wonderful. It sounds instead like the work of obsessive, hateful, tax-leeching, worthless cunts.
I think it's Tobacco Control's constant pretence (in the face of all evidence to the contrary) that THEY DO IT BECAUSE THEY CARE that fucks me off the most. Truly insult added to injury.
Nicola Sturgeons "progressive" politics in action. This foulness and stupidity is by itself is good enough reason to question her judgement and her humanity. There are no question marks over Sheila Duffy, She is odious.
Jesus, have a care. Trying to eat here.
“We want people to understand why the policy is there in the first
place. At the moment, seeing smokers is a part of life but that is
changing.”
Would that because without a policy to enforce all these Government funded leeches would be out of a job?
My husband died suddenly in a fall on 2nd. January 2007. As you can imagine I was in a complete state of shock when they told me he wouldn't make it. I asked if I could have a cigarette and they very reluctantly let me out in the freezing cold at 5 am. No compassion there, my son had a two hour drive so I was totally on my own. I couldn't help comparing when my mum died before the ban when we could smoke in the relatives room and were brought endless cups of tea. A very particular form of cruelty now exists.
That people are de-sensitised to this garbage is just indicative of the level of control that people feel they have about how our taxes are spent and who gets the benefit. As we know only too well here - these people are presently beyond the effective reach of professional codes of conduct and ethics.
Didn't NHS Scotland proclaim 25% reduction in heart attacks in the first year of the smoking indoors ban ?
God rot them seems tame - the lexicon of Dutch profanity seems to offer up some viable alternatives
I'm sorry to hear that, and agree that NHS attitudes have changed a lot - even since I last worked in hospitals in the early 1990's.
I can't help comparing your experience to ours when my grandad was passing away in an old style geriatric hospital in 1975. I distinctly remember a night nurse offering my gran (a lifelong Salvationist) a tot of rum. Similarly, when I worked in one of the last of the big Victorian 'asylums' a few years later it was my duty, once a week, to accompany a bunch of old boys down to the village pub.
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