Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 5 July
July 5, 2019
Happy Birthday NHS! Today marks the 71st birthday of our service. With age should come wisdom and experience, but also a belief that all things are possible. So read on…
Today is also the start of our complete smoking ban. The ban is important because smoking kills. Before it kills it harms your health. While it does that it harms the health of people around you. We work together on small sites and in large spaces. Until today we have had people smoking outside our children’s wards at Sandwell, next to the maternity unit at City, by our A&E departments, or in the bus shelter at Rowley Regis. From today we are going to work together to stop that. Right now, many of us find many ways to be bystanders in it. Some sensible, like fear of challenge of confrontation; some intellectual, citing the air pollution of nearby roads as an equal hazard. But any change requires a group of people to choose to make it so. As NHS colleagues we are that group of people: Surely no one can say that they were unaware of the changes and have not had a chance to ask questions or put forward suggestions. You may disagree with the ban, but you have had every chance to have your voice heard.
We do not nip out for a drink in the pub during the working day. If one of our patients fancied a trip to the off license in the early evening we would not accompany them. Our visitors are often coping with distressing news or real anxiety. Even so we would not encourage them to imbibe outside our doors. What’s my point? Our concern about the change has an element of what’s normal about it. Two decades ago every pub was a fog of smoking. That changed. This change is just that, a shift in what’s normal. We would not accept moderate drinking at work. There is no reason we need to accept or facilitate smoking at work.
A colleague asked if I felt we were infringing rights and choices. I do not. We have provided a year’s worth of smoking cessation advice, nicotine replacement alternatives, inhalators and e-cigarettes. No NHS Trust in the UK is offering the scale of offer and support we have had and will keep in place. This ban is not a half-hearted attempt to signal intentions. The ban is a concerted attempt to change our workplace and to improve health locally. We have vaping shops with big staff discounts in Sandwell outpatients and on the City main spine.
The smoking ban is just one part of our work on employee wellbeing and on public health. I know we have behaviours, cultures and approaches that can damage health. We continue to work on that and this week the Trust Board will review the effectiveness of our approach to mental wellbeing and musculo-skeletal pain. The Monday before we had the latest training event for our weConnect Pioneer teams as we look to build engagement across our organisation.
Bans only work if they feel fair. That means that enforcement of the ban will be overt and overwhelming. Someone you know will most likely receive a £50 fine in the next month. Either they will be asked to stop smoking on site, and not do so, or they will be seen on camera and receive a notice through the post. Senior colleagues, junior colleagues, students and academics, none of us will be exempt from this ban. But the point of the ban is to help you to quit smoking.
So please talk about smoking today and this weekend at work. Talk about why giving up helps. Talk openly about the impact of other people’s smoking on your health and your wellbeing. The conversation we need to have is not about heavy-handed management, or virtue signalling. The conversation we need to have, and keep having, is about how we help people to stop smoking, and to realise the benefits of our changed approach. We have all worked in organisations that did not enforce their ban, just as we may have all worked in organisations that vaccinated very few staff for flu. We made a concerted effort six years ago to be different. Now is our time to do the same with smoking.
If you want more information about the ban, or have ideas about how to make it more effective, do get in touch – or look at the pages on Connect, some of which also form the wrap to this month’s Heartbeat.
Like many others I have been out and about today talking to people about vaping and about the smoking ban. I have met lots of colleagues who have quit or switched. And many more who support the ban, even if they themselves still smoke. Over the weekend, I will see how a busy Saturday night copes with the ban! Either way, with our fabulous estates team cleaning up every day, we will keep going to make our Trust properly smokefree.
Coming to work will no longer involve a fog of smoke. Let’s find other ways to take breaks and see colleagues. Smoking need not be part of that: Cleaner air in our care.
Attached are this week’s IT stats: IT Performance Stats 5 July 2019
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