"Brilliant Surgeon and aftercare from the Nurses."

Thank you ever so much for taking the time to share feedback on your experience of care during your two recent operations. We are pleased to read about the positive experience you had from the teams who operated on you and cared for you on the wards and that they were kind.

We are, however, sorry to read that you had a negative experience of walking through people, including staff, smoking outside the main hospital entrance. We note that your feedback is related to experiences in November 2023 and January 2024; since then new signage has been implemented across the Hallamshire Hospital site to ask people not to smoke outside of hospital buildings.

However, as STH is a smoke-free site, staff smoking on site in uniform would fall under our acceptable behaviour at work policy and will be addressed with staff, if we are aware of them doing this.

Additionally, there is currently a Tobacco & Vapes Bill making its way through Parliament; once this is passed, it will make smoking on hospital sites a criminal offence. This will enable better enforcement and empowering staff to challenge people who are smoking on the STH site.

Once again we are sorry to read about your experience and hope this provides you with some assurance around our commitments to prevent smokers outside hospital buildings.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best with any ongoing care or treatment.