If You Want to Do More

Most Americans believe that smokers should never smoke around nonsmokers. Yet many workplaces and public buildings still allow smoking. To protect themselves and their children, some nonsmokers are trying to change the rules. They are working to convince lawmakers and businesses to protect nonsmokers from cancer-causing tobacco smoke.

Some steps for nonsmokers include:

• Find out about laws that may require your employer to ban or limit smoking. The organizations listed at the end of this booklet can give you more information.
  
  
• Urge your child's school, including preschool, to ban all indoor smoking. When smoking is allowed in some places (such as the teacher's lounge, storage areas, or private offices), secondhand smoke may reach your child through the ventilation system.
  
  
• Write to public officials, newspapers, and businesses to promote policies protecting nonsmokers.
  
  
• Attend public meetings and express your views.
  
  
• When laws exist to protect you, insist that those in charge enforce them.
  
  
• Support organizations in your area that are working to protect nonsmokers. These include local or state offices of the the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, or the American Heart Association.

Health Care Provider and Insurer Activities

1. Health Care Providers: Doctors, dentists, nurses, physician assistants, midwives, and nurse practitioners are powerful messengers for becoming and staying smoke free because they

• Have a very personal relationship with their patients.
• See them fairly regularly.
• Are trusted and respected.
• Communicate with smokers in a context where health is the central issue.

Work with health professionals directly and through their professional associations to deliver the smoke-free message. Provide patient chart stickers that ask about tobacco use, preprinted "prescription" pads for smoking cessation, and lists of cessation resources. Order and distribute copies of the Public Health Service guideline "Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence: A Clinical Practice Guideline" and the consumer guide "You Can Quit Smoking" from www.cdc.gov/tobacco. (Click on "how to quit," then click on "treating tobacco use. . .")

Pregnant women are especially motivated to quit smoking for the health of their babies, and many of them do. Unfortunately, only about one-third of new mothers who quit during pregnancy are still smoke-free 1 year later. Focus your efforts on the health providers who care for women during and after pregnancy (e.g., family practitioners, obstetricians, internists) and those who care for children (e.g., family practitioners, pediatricians). The need to protect the air of infants and children is important to communicate to parents.

• Work with local and statewide medical societies.
• Include smoke-free messages in birthing and Lamaze classes.
• Offer referral sources for cessation programs.
• Place take-home cessation brochures in providers' offices.
• Educate providers and their patients about the dangers of secondhand smoke, especially the harm it causes infants and children. Emphasize the need for remaining smoke free.
• Work with local Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs to deliver and reinforce the smoke-free message, especially around small children.
• Distribute copies of the video Women and Tobacco: Seven Deadly Myths for airing in medical office waiting rooms.

 

  

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