IT is an ironic scene – patients standing outside hospital puffing away on a cigarette.

Some are in their dressing gowns and pyjamas and in some cases even still attached to machinery such as drips.

Now bosses at one hospital trust have pledged to review its rules after new guidelines called for hospitals to ban smoking in their grounds.

Southampton General Hospital provides three smoking shelters on site and the Princess Anne Hospital has one.

But the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) wants smoking shelters to be scrapped as part of a total ban on smoking on hospital sites and says staff should not help patients who want to smoke.

University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Southampton General and the Princess Anne hospitals, said its smoking areas are close to site boundaries and said its security team crack down on anyone smoking near the hospital.

Nursing staff do not escort patients to the smoking zones except in exceptional circumstances, it said.

A spokesman for the trust said: “The purpose of these shelters is to ensure a core smokefree site and our immediate priority is to continue to direct smokers to these zones and promote the support on offer, such as through our partnership with Southampton Quitters.

“Our smoking policy is under constant review and we will look at the NICE guidance – which includes many recommendations already implemented at UHS – as we consider our next steps.”

The spokesman said staff can only smoke within designated areas and had to “take reasonable steps to cover uniforms”

and ensure they did not smell.

Staff breaking the rules face disciplinary action, he added.

A spokeswoman for Winchester’s Royal Hampshire County Hospital said the hospital was a smoke-free site and that patients, staff and visitors were asked to respect this and use the smoking areas, which are provided some way away from the hospital buildings.

Professor Mike Kelly, from NICE, said: “It’s clearly absurd that the most lethal set of toxins to the human body are being passively encouraged in hospitals.”

Simon Clark, director of smokers’ lobby group Forest, said: “NHS staff have a duty of care to protect people’s health but that doesn’t include the right to nag, cajole or bully smokers to quit.

“Many smokers are in hospital for reasons that have nothing to do with smoking. Why should they be told they can’t nip outside and have a cigarette in the open air?”