Banning smoking in the workplace

Papers p 188

A teaching hospital not a million miles from where I work has, for some years, been considering beefing up its non-smoking policy. In the next year a new policy will come into force, which will remove dedicated smoking rooms and hopefully discourage smokers from lighting up around the entrances to buildings. Moving this far has not been easy. The hospital envisages in the next five years moving to a totally smoke free hospital of the kind which Fichtenberg and Glantz (p 188) claim leads some 15% of smokers to give up altogether and others to cut down.1 Perhaps with these findings to hand it might manage it in less than five years—or perhaps not.

The figures from the review1 are startling and would make workplace smoking bans by far the most effective short term smoking cessation strategy, barring outright prohibition, available to any government. In the United …