The day involved a team of volunteers cleaning up all the cigarettes littering the floors around the hospital.
The team wanted to make a big impact by focusing on a small area within the hospital site. It was decided to concentrate on the area around the maternity unit to ensure that smoking is not promoted as being accepted around the maternity ward and to reduce the impact for patients entering the building.
Lynne Walker, Specialist Midwife for Public Health at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals helped to organise this event, and said: “We very much wanted the event to be a positive one, we have a display stand about quitting smoking, there is a table full of information leaflets and quit support details. We have also been on the hospital radio station to talk about national no smoking day and our activities. All clinical staff members within the maternity department were reminded to ask patients being admitted about their smoking status and offer dual nicotine replacement therapy to manage nicotine withdrawal and hopefully prevent the need to stand outside and smoke. A smoke-free site involves the actions of many – and we have to get things right inside the hospital (asking every patient about their smoking; managing nicotine addiction effectively etcetera) before we will have an impact outside of the hospital.”
Lynne continued: “Whilst doing the Big Butt Clean Up, it gave us an opportunity to speak to people, highlight that we are a smoke free hospital site, offer stop smoking support when appropriate and our actions highlighted the issue of littering. We have discovered that whilst the paper around the cigarettes seems to eventually decompose the filters do not and are therefore building up. Frank and Peter who are volunteers and governors attended the day and said they didn’t realise the scale of the problem until the event took place. We all really enjoyed the activity and felt that working as a team towards one goal had been a positive experience; everyone we spoke to about smoking had been pleasant and polite. As a smoke free site we face many challenges, today was just a small step towards a distant goal. If we all take small steps before long a big distance will be covered.” “I want to say a big thank you to everyone who gave up their own time to take part in this challenge. To Paul Collier from our estates team for providing equipment and some of his team to help, Helen Fletcher from the Quit Squad for inspiring us to do something and providing some valuable resources, Denise Morris for doing a lot of the organising with me, to Cat for taking some great photos of the day, and the governors and volunteers who supported this event.”