Public Health England's Ratchet

Here's a puzzler.

A hospital in Swindon wanted to get all that ghastly (dahling) smoke away from those who complain about smokers doing so. So they came up with a very calm, common sense solution.

Head of health and safety Mark Hemphill said: “The trust did have a plan to install visitor smoking shelters, and a policy was drafted and installation of three smoking shelters outside of the atrium, west and emergency department entrances were specified and costed for installation by Carillion last summer."

Wise man. Everyone is catered for and there is no longer any problem. Well, there wouldn't be until Public Health England chipped in.

“The plans changed three months ago at the direct request of Public Health England, who wrote to each trust chief executive and stated the importance of relaunching the Smoke Free NHS.” 

All NHS trusts in England will go smoke free by the start of 2019, with smoking banned from hospital grounds.

Might I remind you that there is no law against smoking at any NHS hospital so therefore they have no enforcement powers behind this. Nor should there ever be. The idea that an establishment owned by taxpayers - of which smokers are some of the highest paying personally - can ban people from using a legal product without any evidence whatsoever of harm to others outdoors, is absurd. The fact that these bans include the car park, where the NHS is happy for instantly lethal carbon monoxide to be generously spewed out, just makes the whole thing laughable.

Yet despite non-existent enforcement, PHE is issuing demands rather than guidance.

Now, the reason I find this curious is because PHE have often been asked why they cannot instruct hospitals and other organisations to allow the use of e-cigs. The stock answer is always that they can issue guidance but that they cannot demand that it be adhered to.

So why the difference here? Why are they all of a sudden able to get heavy with hospitals while not doing the same when it comes to demanding them to treat vaping favourably? I expect it's the usual authoritarian public sector disease that the ratchet only goes one way. And every time away from any semblance of liberty.

In fact, we can see this in the response from the hospital.

Dr Ian Orpen and Dr Christin Blanshard, co-chairmen for the clinical board of the Bath, North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Sustainable Transformation Partnership, which commissions NHS services, said the changes were part of a bid to stop patients and staff smoking. 

The doctors said: “We understand that some people may not wish to stop smoking and we will be providing them with assistance to ensure that during their stay in hospital or whilst at work they can abstain by using nicotine replacement therapy and support from our stop smoking advisors.”

So where the fuck was PHE's 'guidance' or demands about e-cigs to that hospital? There is absolutely no mention of other products except pharma NRT. Remember this is the organisation that announced to the world they'd be happy with vaping products being sold in hospitals.

Did they conveniently forget?