North Carolina hospitals becoming tobacco-free zones
North Carolina health officials are lauding a milestone in their efforts to spread no-smoking zones.
As of Monday, all of the acute-care hospitals in the state have become tobacco-free campuses.
The voluntary policies mean that smoking is not allowed in the more than 100 hospitals – including their buildings, sidewalks, entrances and parking lots.
The effort began three years ago and has been spearheaded by N.C. Prevention Partners, a nonprofit group based in Chapel Hill. The group received a grant from The Duke Endowment and partnered up with the N.C. Hospital Association to spread the initiative.
Hospitals in Rocky Mount, Louisburg and Eden were expected to switch over the weekend, completing the group’s goal.
“North Carolina is leading the nation in tobacco-free hospitals,” said Meg Molloy, N.C. Prevention Partners’ president and CEO. “With these policies in place, millions of visits to hospitals each year by patients, visitors and employees will be protected from exposure to harmful secondhand smoke.”
Brunswick Community Hospital, Dosher Memorial Hospital, Pender Memorial Hospital and New Hanover Regional Medical Center all adopted tobacco-free policies in 2007.
At New Hanover Regional, employees were offered free nicotine replacement therapies and smoking cessation classes leading up to the change. Nicotine patches and gum were made available in the gift shop for patients and visitors.
“It provides for a healthier environment for our patients, family, people who work here by not having smokers outside all the entrances,” New Hanover Regional spokeswoman Carolyn Fisher said. “It just keeps it cleaner and healthier.”
One of the hospital’s neighbors, however, does not think the policy has done the same for her street.
Once smokers got banned from the hospital’s property, some of them moved over to the fringes to light up and over toward R.W. Williams’ house.
Williams, who lives on Glen Meade Road next to the hospital, said she began to see people across the street from her home the week New Hanover Regional stopped allowing smoking.
Since then, Williams has complained to the hospital numerous times about contractors, patients and workers smoking near her house, leaving cigarette butts behind and loitering.
Visitors who smoke there at night are particularly unnerving, she said.
“I’m 100 percent for a smoke-free environment. Obviously, I hate cigarette smoke. I’m allergic to it,” Williams said. “If you’re such a large employer, and you’re in the position of having so many patients and visitors who do smoke, you can’t say, ‘You’re not going to smoke on this campus without providing them a place to smoke.”
She said she doesn’t begrudge someone with a family member in the emergency being stressed and wanting to smoke. But Williams said she wished the hospital would designate a smoking spot.
“You tell them, ‘You can’t smoke on our property.’ Well, they’re going to go somewhere and it’s unfortunate that it’s to the residential neighborhood where they go,” she said. “It’s a very frustrating situation because it’s 24 hours a day.”
Fisher said the hospital has people patrolling the parking lots, and hospital police officers try to stop people from smoking in the nearby areas.
“We try to control that as much as we possibly can,” she said.
Copyright © Starnewsonline
