Doctors remove no-smoking signs

Pakistan’s Federal Enforcement Committee on Tobacco Control was unimpressed when its members paid a surprise visit to the Islamabad Hospital Wing of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), the country’s premier teaching hospital, according to a story in The News.

They reportedly found blatant violations by doctors and attendants of the country’s anti-smoking law, the Prohibition of Smoking and Protection of Non-Smokers Health Ordinance 2002.

And they found that the placement of No Smoking signs in lobbies leading to the medical wards to be irrational and deficient; so that smoking in these locations was rampant.

The Children’s Hospital, which shares a site with PIMS, was found to offer a completely smoke-free environment. The committee has been tasked by the Ministry of Health since January 2008 with examining the extent to which the anti-smoking ordinance is being complied with. Led by director general implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), Shaheen Masud, the 11-member committee paid its first ‘surprise visit’ to PIMS and was said to have been ‘surprised to observe absolute non-compliance of the anti-smoking law within the Islamabad Hospital, and 100-percent compliance in the Children’s Hospital’.

The Times said that the doctors and consultants of the PIMS were ‘the key culprits’. Unable to resist the temptation of smoking within the hospital premises, they found refuge either in their rest rooms or in the doctors’ cafeteria.

The cafeteria did not have a single No-Smoking sign; not because it was never affixed, but because the doctors removed it each time they saw one.

The story is as: https://www.thenews.com.pk/archive/print/167700-Dengue-awareness.