"Smoking staff"

Dear footballhy84,

Thank you for sharing your story. My name is Gemma Patton, I am the Health Promotion Officer at Central Gippsland Health (CGH).

As a health service, we want patients, residents, visitors, volunteers and staff to enjoy a safe, healthy and comfortable environment. This is why Central Gippsland Health prohibits smoking in any indoor or outdoor areas without our property boundaries.

We have a number of strategies in place to support our staff to maintain a smoke-free environment including:

- Ensuring all staff are aware if our Smoke-Free Workplace procedure

- Erecting "No Smoking" signage around the perimeter of the hospital, This includes recently erected signs in areas where smokers have been identified on site.

- Providing free Nicotine Replacement Therapy to staff, to support smoking cessation.

- Providing free counselling and cessation support to staff.

- Providing a SMART recovery group which is open to all community members including our staff. This group provides support to manage addictions including smoking/nicotine addiction.

We recognise that there is more to be done to ensure that CGH is consistently smoke-free. We are always looking into additional strategies to better support our staff, patients and visitors with smoking cessation to prevent this from occurring in the future.

Kind regards

Gemma Patton