mahindra chincholkar

When I was the director of cancer services in west London, we included a smoking room in the cancer centre that we built. The press were shocked and asked why we would ever allow smoking in a cancer facility. I replied that, for people who are lifelong smokers, if they’re having chemotherapy, they need to smoke to relieve the stress. It seemed unnecessarily cruel and authoritarian to stop them. We should be looking to create a dedicated outdoor smoking section away from other patients/visitors - not directly outside the entrance. Nobody, I repeat nobody, is going to quit smoking altogether because they are prevented from doing so at a hospital. We need to be preventing lifelong addiction – long before the patient arrives in hospital.