That is how often staff are having to shoo people away who light up cigarettes at the entrance of Dubbo Hospital, according to Western NSW Local Health District (LHD) chief executive Scott McLachlan.

Despite it being a decade since hospitals officially went smoke free, Mr McLachlan said, local staff were spearheading a campaign to reinforce the message that had clearly not got through to some people.

Yesterday saw the launch of the You just don't smoke around hospitals campaign at Dubbo Hospital.

"We still have a lot of people who think it's OK to smoke at the front door of an emergency department, Mr McLachlan said.

"The health of the community is important and smoking around hospitals doesn't make sense on anyone's scale when you have the health organisation trying to keep people healthy and you've got smokers at the front door."

Mr McLachlan said tobacco was the largest easily-preventable cause of death and illness in society today.

"And we know the impact of secondary smoke can be huge," he said.

"We don't want to have to go near fining people because we hope the community of Dubbo will respect that this is a health campus and do the right thing."

Indeed, Mr McLachlan said he had no doubt twenty years from now people would look back and think how absurd it was smoking had once been permitted on hospital grounds.

Western NSW LHD manager of health promotion Lyndal O'Leary said the renewed push to remind people of the existing smoke-free health policy came as the final stages of new NSW smoke-free environment legislation came into effect. They included new rules about smoking near the entrances to public buildings, smoke-free outdoor dining areas and the option for the LHD to develop by-laws regulating smoking on campus.

Western NSW LHD was not enacting a by-law, she said, so all health facilities and their grounds would stay smoke-free.

The campaign would aim to make sure patients and staff were aware of what support was available for them to quit, Mrs O'Leary said, which included nicotine replacement therapy.

"It becomes a real issue if you've got staff that find little nooks and crannies where everybody can see them smoking and we're trying to tell patients and visitors they can't smoke here but those staff are smoking," she said.

"So it's important that we are prepared to support them with nicotine replacement therapy, as well as the patients."

Another idea that might be implemented in the future was loading hospital vending machines with nicotine replacement therapies, Mrs O'Leary said.

"It's early days yet, but a few of the facilities on the Central Coast and Sydney have negotiated to have them in the machines."

Meanwhile the You just don't smoke around hospitals campaign would be rolled out across the Western LHD.

"We did a pilot at Bloomfield in Orange and it went successfully," Mrs O'Leary said.

"The smaller sites have now seen this signage and they want it too."