Nov 1, 2011
Do Hospital Smoking Bans Put Addicted Patients in Danger?
An article in today’s Winnipeg Free Press details the decade-old story of a hospital patient who went out for a smoke on a bitterly cold winter night and found herself locked outside without a way back in. An hour later, she was found unconscious in a snow bank, suffering from hypothermia and frostbite to her hands and feet, which resulted in the amputation of several of her fingers.
Many hospitals ban smoking on all premises, but a recent study found that many patients (and staff) who smoke don’t obey these bans, which can lead to dangerous circumstances in the winter: IV lines and electronic equipment can malfunction in extreme cold and patients are often accidentally locked out and nurses and doctors cannot locate them when they leave their unit.
Does the enforcment of such smoking bans put tobacco-addicted patients in unwarranted danger?
See the full story at the Winnipeg Free Press.
The smoking bans and their enforcement are necessary and make sense. The lack of facilities to help tobacco-addicted patients is the problem.
Saeed: I agree with you that the bans make sense generally and should be enforced to keep entry ways and indoor spaces smoke-free. The question is whether, recognizing many of the smokers will smoke regardless, hospitals should consider designated smoking areas, away from public entrances, to minimize such possible risks and missing patients who’ve wandered off to their smoking hiding place. But this is an unlikely position for a hospital to take, as they would not want to be seen as condoning health-damaging conduct which lands many patients in there in the first place.
I do believe that hospitals should consider designated areas for smokers, away from the hospital entrances, because as much as there are smokers, there are non smokers too such as patients, visitors, employees going in and out of those doors, so I think it’s only fair to come up with an area reserved ONLY for addicted patients.
I guess it is not the right moment to talk about the manufactured hysteria that anti-smokers have created with their ”secondhand smoke kills” mantra as there is no way anyone will be convinced that there is no significant elevated risk in breathing in hundreds of times diluted second hand smoke in the indoors and thousands of times in the outdoors, unless they do extensive research on the subject which can take hundreds of hours. But it is however the right moment to talk about the unintended consequences of barbarian smoking bans in hospitals.
Independant studies have shown that many smokers, especially those who need psychiatric treatment, avoid going to the hospital altogether until they’re eventually forced to go due to severe complications that are far more difficult & expensive to treat. Now how can this be any better for the patient, for society and for healthcare costs in general?
Patients who find it difficult to stay smoke-free in one of the most stressful situations of their lives (hospitalization) deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Warm sheltered and ventilated designated areas should be mandatory in (or just outside) hospitals to accommodate smokers that have no desire to make the extra difficult effort to quit during their already stressful hospital stay. Respect and compassion towards smokers is in no way indicative that hospitals approve of smoking. It is a sign that they approve of being respectful of their patients’ specific needs and unwillingness to tackle issues totally irrelevant to the reason they are in the hospital in the first place.
It is clear the anti-tobacco groups (kindly named) have created an atmosphere where intolerance of smokers is socially acceptable – just read the comments in the Winnipeg Free Press story to see rabid this intolerance is. These very unacceptable attitudes breed discrimination that not only physically endangers smokers but deleteriously impacts on their health, lives and livelihoods. When other groups were mistreated in this manner we created laws to protect them. It’s time some sanity prevailed here as well.
It is clear the anti-tobacco groups (kindly named) have created an atmosphere where intolerance of smokers is socially acceptable – just read the comments in the Winnipeg Free Press story to see how rabid this intolerance is. These very unacceptable attitudes breed discrimination that not only physically endangers smokers but deleteriously impacts on their health, lives and livelihoods. When other groups were mistreated in this manner we created laws to protect them. It’s time some sanity prevailed here as well.
Lets not pretend that freezing to death or malfunctioning equipment is the only risk to smokers from hospital smoking bans.
Anytime someone is coerced to isolate themselves from “the herd”, they are being placed in a position of risk. In Britain, a young nurse was murdered. There is the possibility of rape and robbery.
So is this the hospital’s position? That it is healthier to try to coerce smokers into quitting using techniques of isolation, risk of enforcement procedure, shame, physical discomfort, risk of death, social disapproval then it is to respect their perfectly legal choices?
BTW – there was another man who froze to death in Ontario for the same reason (Murray Miles Patterson, Gore Bay Ontario 2007).
Knowing that smoking is beneficial, particularly to anyone suffering a mental or neurological illness, it is especially inhumane to deny smoking by force for those patients who suffer from mental illness. It is medical treatment without consent.
Has anyone else witnessed the bruising and injuries to senior citizen’s who fall and injury themselves trying to get to the smoking area in inclement weather?
How about senior citizen’s being evicted from their homes because they are smokers? Does any real live intelligent human being actually believe that anyone is at risk because someone is smoking in the apartment next door?
http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/city/story.html?id=7cdc827d-b282-48bf-8863-222577ebfe64
Sanity must return! And it is obvious that we cannot depend on our health care professionals or the well paid and well funded anti-tobacco activists to treat anyone with compassion.
Fatties and drinkers – your turn is next!
“as they would not want to be seen as condoning health-damaging conduct which lands many patients in there in the first place.”
And do you feel the same way with hospitals housing Tim Horton Restaurants within them?
I think people are forgetting that the patient is not a prisoner nor have they have given up their personal autonomy in exchange for medical service.
“BTW – there was another man who froze to death in Ontario for the same reason (Murray Miles Patterson, Gore Bay Ontario 2007).”
And don’t forget the other victim of that tragedy: (Charged with failing to provide the necessaries of life and criminal negligence causing death is Ted Mandigo.)
Back in 2005 the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office told the Ontario Government that “We know that such a policy, in a hospital, has the
potential to damage the therapeutic relationship between patients and their caregivers.” But the government didn’t care that “strip searches” and “cancellation of privileges and visits due to being denied access to smoking; and patients being placed in restraint or seclusion following denial of or access to smoking.” was happening in these hospitals.
Is it any wonder that people are not seeking medical treatment until their condition is out of control.
To avoid repeating what I have posted in the Winnipeg Free Press, I am copy pasting here important information that everyone should know about:
Has the self-righteous Routledge and all those that fell for the passive smoking fraud hook line and sinker ever question Health Canada why they have nixed electronic cigarettes which is a perfect solution to the predicament that anti-smoker zealots and their pimps at Big Pharma created not only for patients in hospitals but for old age people, prisoners, and even common citizens who just want to get their social and family life back?
For those who still don’t know what e-cigarettes are, google them. In summary they are nicotine delivery devices that mimic the act of smoking without neither the smoke nor the smell. They have been shown to be a) not any more harmful than expensive pharmaceutical inhalers to the users b) harmless and odorless to by-standers c) satisfying for the cigarette craving when it’s just not possible to smoke. d) some people have quit smoking altogether thanks to e-cigarettes. In fact the quit success rate is magnitudes higher than NRT.
Why did Health Canada ban them? You’re going to have to clear that up with them. But from all looks of it they want to protect both their partners the pharmaceutical industry that peddle ineffective NRT, and perhaps even Big Tobacco, not to mention their own tax revenue. In the meantime sick and frail patients and old people will continue suffering or dying from hypothermia or frost bite. Shame on our medical authorities, shame on Health Canada, double shame on all those passive agressive citizens that find it all perfectly normal because it is only smokers who have brought it upon themselves after all!
Read this correspondence between C.A.G.E. and Health Canada and follow all the links to further correspondence. Be prepared to be thoroughly disgusted if you have any conscience! http://cagecanada.blogspot.com/2009/05/e-cigarettes-letter-to-health-canada.html
I am Iro Cyr, the correspondant with Health Canada.
The real shame is that we had to wait until people started dying (the murdered nurse in the U.K., the hypothermia cases in Canada) before the Civil Liberties Association deigned to ask if perhaps, just maybe, the anti-tobacco movement is out of control?
I really hope that the CCLC starts to push back against policies like these, as well as Health Canada’s prohibitionist policy towards e-cigarettes. If a product like cigarettes can be available on the market, then there is no reason to ban e-cigarettes, and in fact I consider it to a violation of man’s natural rights to be restricted in this kind of choice.
Thanks for all the great work you do, and please look into this.
Now here’s some common sense at work:
http://topnews.us/content/244565-ban-smoking-be-lifted-wa-hospitals
Ban on Smoking To be Lifted From WA Hospitals
Excerpt: ”Country Health CEO Ian Smith stated that smoking ban was levied so patients’ health could be improved but if loss outweighs the benefit then there is no use of such ban.”
What needs to be part of this discussion, is the Medical institutions designating one demographic worthy of treatment and due respect while destroying the value of another. They have extended their authority to eliminate personal autonomy rights, by declaring smoking as an addiction, which under the law would have these people protected, because in official terms they are medically disabled. We can afford parking spaces to amputees at the entrance. We can supply injection sites to drug addicts and we can supply crack pipes to addicts, we can even supply marijuana smoking rooms, for the staff at the U of T. While out of the other side of our face we can ban smokers from hospital grounds. Based in the convenient cherry picked myths of highly toxic burning leaves. The growing trend among these same “Public Health” dictators, is to bar smokers from employment, claiming an appearance has to be established. one of exclusionary attitudes and self sanctimonious moral aversions will have to be sufficient to the cause, when no health risk is attainable. How that piece of discrimination would differ from, an employer demanding sexual acts in exchange for continued employment, needs to be explained. Coercive attitudes and abuses of position are the medical toast of the day. Eventually when too many demographics are complaining, the act and the bandwagon of pitchforks and lanterns will be seen for what it is. With those reefer madness fanatics who are responsible, punished to the full extent of the law. Nothing new here, we have seen this paternalist insanity repeated many times throughout history and as it usually rises to prominence as an act of financial conflict and self interest, so too will this industrial socialist campaign see an enthusiastic end, with participating parties leaving a tarnished heritage for their children to bear, in shame.