Smoke Free :: Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

As an NHS body we have a duty to be a health-promoting organisation, improving people’s physical health as well as their mental health. This is why we are a smokefree Trust, and ask people who use services, staff, and all of our visitors not to smoke tobacco-based products on our premises. You can read our Smokefree Policy here.

Anyone staying in our hospitals who is a smoker will be offered Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT). This includes a combination of sprays, lozenges, patches, gum and other items to suit their needs. We aim to make sure anyone arriving at hospital who is a smoker is offered NRT within 30 minutes of arrival and their care plan includes support for stopping smoking.

We have Smoking Cessation Advisors working in our Trust to support people who use services, their families and carers and staff to quit smoking and to sign post people to the specialist stop smoking services listed below.

Smoking and mental health

It's widely known that stopping smoking improves our physical health, but it's also proven to boost mental health and wellbeing. In fact, smokers are also more likely than non-smokers to develop depression over time and smokers who have existing mental health conditions need higher doses of some antipsychotic medicines and antidepressants because smoking interferes with the way these medicines work.
When people stop smoking, studies show:

anxiety, depression and stress levels are lower
quality of life and positive mood improve
the dosage of some medicines used to treat mental health problems can be reduced

Most smokers say they want to stop, but some continue because smoking seems to relieve stress and anxiety – however the relief from smoking is only temporary and in fact it's the effects of smoking itself that are likely to have caused the anxiety in the first place.