Time to Smoke: Facilitating Smoking Breaks in Mental Health Inpatient Settings

Conclusions: Considerable time and resources is being used to facilitate smoking in mental health hospitals with smoke-free policies which allow smoking in hospital grounds. This resource could be redirected to provide evidence-based care that improves health and wellbeing, such as tobacco dependence treatment. Implications: This study is the first to estimate the time and opportunity costs of facilitating smoking across different wards in a mental health setting in the United Kingdom. Health care resources are scarce, including staff time. Every time staff facilitate smoking, clinical time is diverted away from therapeutic activities that contribute to improved patient health. Rather than suggesting any financial savings can be made through the introduction of smoke-free services, we present one metric of the value to mental health service providers of the hours of clinical time that could be released to provide therapeutic care.
Source: Nicotine and Tobacco Research - Category: Addiction Authors: Tags: Brief Report Source Type: research