CLINICIANS have a “duty” to help people quit smoking and spending thousands of pounds building smoking shelters at the Royal Bolton Hospital “seems ludicrous”, a stop smoking expert has said.

Tracey Holliday, is part of the Bump the Habit team at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, which gives advice and support to pregnant women about quitting smoking.

She says quitting smoking is the single most important thing an expectant mum can do for her child, and is more beneficial than taking folic acid.

Ms Holliday also works with the Trust’s smoking cessation team and says she is against the hospital building new smoking shelters.

She said: “We are not there to make people quit smoking and are not the anti-smoking police but if people don’t know that the services are available then they can’t access them.”

Her comments come as the hospital has launched a debate about whether they should build three new smoking shelters, at a cost of £1,200 each, in the Minerva Road hospital’s grounds.

The hospital and its grounds are a non-smoking site, but patients, staff and visitors regularly flout the rules and smoke in front of entrances to the buildings, leading to complaints from people who have to walk through clouds of smoke to get into the building.

Ms Holliday said she did not believe any clinicians at the Trust would be in favour of reinstating smoking shelters and says she does not believe that shelters will work as when the old shelters were there, people continued to smoke in the entrance to the building.

She also believes the money would be better spent on services to help people quit smoking and said if current draft NICE guidelines, which advocate for smoke-free hospital grounds, are passed, then the hospital would have to remove the shelters anyway.

Ms Holliday said having a baby was a “lottery” as sometimes mums can do “everything right and something goes wrong” — but she said quitting smoking means more odds are in favour of the baby.

To take part in the debate fill in the coupon and send it to The Big Hospital Smoking Debate c/o The Bolton News, The Wellsprings, Victoria Square, Bolton, BL1 1AR or drop it into the Royal Bolton Hospital main entrance.