Abstract
Nurses make a difference in smoking cessation, increasing quitting success rates in both hospital and outpatient settings. Nurse-led interventions for smoking cessation increase the chance of successful quitting by 50% [1]. Only 20–30% of nurses provide smoking cessation interventions to their patients; a statistic that clearly can be improved upon. Furthermore, nurses who smoke perceive themselves as being poor role models as smoking cessation interventionists. Clearly insufficient attention has been given to the problem of peer support. A new program called Tobacco-Free Nurses can help nurses nationally and internationally both in their efforts to support their patients’ smoking cessation and to provide support for the nurse who wants to quit smoking.
Tobacco-Free Nurses is the first initiative of its kind in the United States that is a program to help nurses quit smoking, and also serves as one site for all the resources that nurses need to support their patients in smoking cessation. This initiative is funded by a grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
UCLA School of Nursing Professor Linda Sarna and Stella Aguinaga Bialous, a nurse who is a tobacco-control consultant in San Francisco, are spearheading the multi-faceted national initiative, along with Dr. Mary Ellen Wewers, School of Nursing at The Ohio State University and Dr. Erika Froelicher from the University of California, San Francisco. This initiative is aimed at supporting the country's largest group of health professionals in quitting smoking. It deserves international attention because a significant number of nurses in many parts of the world smoke.
One barrier to conducting smoking-cessation interventions with patients is nurses who themselves continue to smoke. That number, estimated at 18% in the US and around 24% in the UK, marks the highest percentage of smokers among all health professionals.
Nurses have a tremendous opportunity to assist in tobacco-control efforts. However, smoking among nurses limits their ability to be strong tobacco-control advocates, including the act of engaging in smoking-cessation efforts with their patients.
In addition to individual nurses who smoke, the nursing profession as a whole has had limited leadership in the tobacco-control movement. The Tobacco-Free Nurses researchers hope to expand nursing leadership in tobacco control through another Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant funded through its Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco.
In the past, there has been no coordinated effort to support nurses in their own cessation efforts or to stress the critical importance of being smoke-free role models. Dr. Sarna and her colleagues have worked with a variety of nursing organizations and tobacco-control experts to help us develop this nationwide initiative that will provide nurses who smoke with cessation resources. The website for nurses is the single most important site containing information for nurses to assist them in counseling their patients and for nurses who smoke to aid them in their own smoking cessation: http://www.tobaccofreenurses.org/.
One of these resources will include $100 of free, individualized smoking-cessation services that will be offered through the Internet for each nurse who chooses to participate. Additionally, in partnership with nursing organizations including the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the American Nurses Foundation and the National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurses, a variety of activities will be developed to support smoking-cessation efforts for the workforce and the public.
Despite progress in reducing the prevalence of tobacco use, in 2000, there were still 46.5 million adults in the United States who were smokers, 26% were males and 21% were females. Smoking continues to be a major cause of preventable illness, disability and premature death in many parts of the world. Nurses have a tremendous opportunity to assist smokers in smoking cessation in every practice setting [2–4].