Three smoking wardens fail to manage the problem

The story is here. Three men hired (at £12,000 a year each) to ensure adherence to the smoking policy at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow left after days following abuse from smokers outside the hospital.

I sympathise with the wardens to the extent that £12,000 is very poor compensation for work that brings public ire upon you. But the basis on which they were employed was wrong. I was visiting a relative in hospital recently and was struck with how few smokers could be seen in the grounds of the hospital – considering how many smokers are around at any one time, a huge building, thirteen or so storeys high, I doubt whether I ever passed more than a dozen or so smokers in the 200 yards or so between the main door and the gate off the premises – the signs do seem to be observed by most people most of the time.

Unfortunately there are laws against managing this issue effectively. What these wardens were employed to do was effectively to tell these people off for not behaving considerately (even if they thought they were 'helping' them by offering them the opportunity to stop smoking). What the situation needs is an alternative that smokers can choose in preference to standing in the doorways, or shivering under a sign. This means a comfortable, air conditioned room in which they can enjoy a coffee and a newspaper.

Health authorities do not like to contemplate that such courtesies could be offered to smokers, as they believe that they will encourage other people to smoke. They should remember that at the time such facilities were offered, smoking rates were falling faster than they are now. They believe that public hostility will stop people smoking, in line with their support for denormalisation and stigmatisation (approaches to human behaviour that have no place in a public health setting).

I am not surprised at the hostility of smokers, who are tax-paying members of the public. Public hostility is being whipped up against them, with the use of posters explaining how their smoke drifts through open windows and into the lungs of desperately ill children (as if the smoke were distinguishable from general urban pollution).  This is a matter of policy, because it is easier to blame smokers for lack of consideration than to solve the problem by catering for them with respect, and in a way that does not inconvenience others.

Employing wardens (especially on the cheap) to deal with the consequences of a blanket ban on health service premises was never going to work. Solving the problem will take a reversal in the law to enable the provision of a proper smoking room – anything else will just be a sticking plaster.