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Policy With Regard to Smoking: Adoption & Fostering

There is increasingly strong medical evidence to support the view that smoking and passive smoking have a detrimental effect upon the health and development of children.

This Agency believes that a smoking environment should be avoided, in the best interests of children who are to be placed away from home and we are working towards a position where no looked after child will be exposed to living in a smoking household.

In order for this to be achieved:

• Children under the age of five and older children with asthma or other respiratory problems will not usually be placed with carers who smoke.
• Where applicants to foster or adopt do smoke, discussion should take place with them and information be provided early in the assessment process and again at annual reviews on the dangers of passive smoking to the health and development of children.
• Where applicants have given up smoking, a child in the high risk group (see 1st bullet point) will not usually be placed with them until they have given up smoking successfully for a minimum of 12 months.
• Approved adopters and foster carers need to know that if they do smoke, placing social workers are more likely to choose non-smokers for preference. They should be asked to seriously consider giving up, to have the widest choice of placements.
• Children will not usually be placed with carers who smoke, particularly those from non-smoking birth families, unless there are other very significant matching factors which would override this.
• Currently approved foster carers who smoke and/or have frequent visitors who smoke will be encouraged to create a smoke-free home, only smoke outside the house and not in the car if the child is present.
• All applicants and carers who smoke are encouraged to make use of the Wiltshire Smoking Cessation Service, run by the Primary Care Trust.

Children’s Services Procedure
May 2007
Version 3
Volume 3/Looked After Children

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