Vaping should be on prescription, health body says

HOSPITALS have been told to start selling e-cigarettes and allow patients to vape indoors – even in bed.

Public Health England says every smoker struggling to quit, including pregnant women, should be encouraged to take up e-cigarettes.

Officials have urged hospitals to replace smoking shelters with vaping lounges and said patients in single rooms should be allowed to vape in bed. And they said the devices should be given out by GPS on prescription.

The calls come as PHE published an independent review into e-cigarettes that said 57,000 smokers quit every year by taking up vaping. It endorsed previous claims that vaping is 95 per cent less harmful than smoking, pointing out that cigarettes kills two in three smokers. Yet half of all smokers wrongly believed e-cigarettes were just as dangerous, it said.

In the report, PHE called on the NHS to make it easy for vapers to find somewhere to vape in hospital, while enforcing a total smoking ban anywhere on hospital grounds. The review authors said pregnant women who smoke should be encouraged to switch. Author Prof Linda Bauld said pregnant women should never be discouraged from vaping if the alternative was that they continued smoking.

Prof John Newton, director for health improvement at PHE, said: “Our review reinforces the finding that vaping is a fraction of the risk of smoking. It would be tragic if thousands of smokers who could quit with the help of an e-cigarette are being put off due to false fears about their safety.”

Ann Mcneill, lead author, said smokers inhaled 7,000 smoke constituents, 70 of which were known to cause cancer. “People smoke for the nicotine but, contrary to what the majority believe, nicotine causes little, if any, of the harm. Toxic smoke is the culprit,” she said.

But Joyce Robins, from Patient Concern, said: “If they can find any spare rooms they should be used to treat patients, not turn them into vaping areas.”

The report was compiled by King’s College London, the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, the University of Stirling and Cancer Research UK.