Property Rights: PA Hospitals

November 22, 2007
By Jamie North, The Daily Item

DANVILLE — As Valley hospitals continue to enforce newly minted tobacco-free policies, two health systems are giving some patients a free pass on the restriction.

Geisinger Medical Center, Danville, and Berwick Hospital Center are keeping an exemption in place for a few behavioral health patients who face challenges that exceed the stress of having to forgo a smoke break.

Geisinger is allowing some patients in its Behavioral Health Unit to smoke on its recreation deck under the supervision of staff, who like other employees are still restricted from smoking on campus.

The deck can only be accessed by those patients in the unit, according to Tom Schaeffer, Geisinger’s public relations and marketing coordinator.

“It’s allowed at certain times during the day,” Mr. Schaeffer said. “Since many of those patients are in crisis or are suffering from mental illness, from a clinical perspective, it’s not the ideal time to ask them to take on the task of trying to quit smoking.”

Mr. Schaeffer said Geisinger provides those patients with education materials and smoking cessation aides if they’re interested in quitting. He added that behavioral health patients who suffer from another illness, such as asthma, or anything in which smoking would compound their medical condition, are not allowed to smoke.

“This policy is only for patients who are seeking inpatient services in the Behavioral Health Unit,” Mr. Schaeffer said.

Jackie Ridall, Berwick’s director of human resources, said the Berwick hospital is continuing a similar policy even though it has become a tobacco-free campus.

Berwick and Geisinger are among several area health systems that joined the Tobacco Free Healthcare of Central Pennsylvania coalition spurred on by ACTION Health Inc. in Sunbury, which launched a campaign this summer to recruit local hospitals and health-care groups to go tobacco-free.

Evangelical Community Hospital in Lewisburg, Sunbury Community Hospital and Outpatient Center, Shamokin Area Community Hospital and Susquehanna Health System are also involved.

The coalition, which also includes support from Clinical Outcomes Group in Northumberland and the American Heart Association, is working collectively toward tobacco-free health care.

Officials from Sunbury and Shamokin hospitals, as well as the Susquehanna system in Williamsport, said their facilities have gone completely tobacco-free.

---

Banning smoking at hospitals gets groups fired up
October 11, 2007
By SUSAN SCHWARTZ, Press Enterprise Writer
Hospitals nationwide are going smoke-free, according to Bronson Flick, associate director of Americans For Nonsmokers’ Rights.
But Michael J. McFadden, mid-Atlantic regional director for The Smoker’s Club, said such efforts violate smokers’ rights.
The Mayo Clinic was among the first to ban smoking, introducing its policy around 2000, Flick said. Lately, his group’s list of
hospitals that don’t allow smoking anywhere on their grounds has grown by about 100 every three months. That doesn’t
necessarily include all the smoke-free hospitals, he added, just the ones his group has learned about.
In Pennsylvania, the list includes 39 hospitals.
“Any hospital that doesn’t have smoke-free grounds now is probably considering it,” he said.
Arkansas has a statewide ban on smoking in all except mental health hospitals.
Flick said hospitals that allowed smoking outside had complaints about smoke drifting into buildings through doors and windows.
It also hurt workers who had to breathe second-hand smoke when they tended patients outside in smoking areas, said Flick.
Meanwhile, hospitals wanted a healthier work force, he said.
‘Going to be dead’
It was ironic to allow smoking at hospitals in the first place, Flick added.
“Patients come to the hospital for healing, but the hospitals were enabling tobacco use, the leading cause of preventable death,” he said.
But McFadden objected.
“These bans are a social engineering tool to get people to stop smoking by ostracizing them,” he said. “… If you believe
government and businesses have the right to make choices for people and manage their lives, and try to manipulate people,
it’s fine. I don’t. People have a right to make their own choice.”
Bystanders aren’t endangered by second-hand smoke outside, he said.
But forcing smokers off campus can create tensions with neighbors, who find strangers smoking on their sidewalks and porches, he said. Forbidding smoking in a parking lot is particularly counter-productive, since cars emit more
dangerous pollutants than cigarettes, McFadden said.
“If you put me in a garage with 100 smokers, after a half hour, I’ll be just fine,” he said. “If you shut me up in a garage with just one car running, I’m going to be dead.”

————–
Butts out at Berwick? Hospital
By SUSAN SCHWARTZ
Press Enterprise Writer
BERWICK — Starting Nov. 15, no one will be allowed to light up anywhere on the campus of the Berwick Hospital Center, officials said Tuesday.
“It was the right thing to do,” said John DeFinnis, chairman of the hospital board, during the hospital’s annual public meeting. “We were torn by the fact that a person has certain rights, and a percentage of our employees do smoke. We worried we might lose some employees.”
But so far, hospital officials said, workers haven’t complained. And if they quit, they might not have many other places to go. CEO Steve Grubbs said hospitals in Shamokin and Sunbury, as well as Geisinger Medical Center, are also going smoke-free.
Residents in Berwick Retirement Village will be allowed to smoke under the same rules that now exist, since the nursing home is their home, Grubbs said.
‘We’ll be gentle’
Currently, people are allowed to smoke at designated areas outside the building.
When the new rules take effect, people won’t be allowed to smoke even in their cars, he said. All other forms of tobacco will also be banned.
The hospital hopes to help employees quit, said Jackie Ridall, director of human resources. On Monday, employees and their spouses were offered their first program on quitting. The hospital is also offering to help pay for smoking-cessation products.
So far, employees have told Ridall that they approve of the change, she said.
“We had one person who is a 30-year smoker who said this was just the thing to make her start quitting,” said Ridall.
Employees who break the rules will go through the normal disciplinary process. Patients and their families will be told about the policy and asked not to smoke on the property.
“We’ll be gentle,” Ridall said. “We won’t take the cigarette from their mouths.”
She said the hospital plans to ask doctors to work with alternatives for their patients, such as nicotine patches or gum, before patients are admitted to the hospital.
Eventually, the change could result in lower insurance premiums for the hospital, but that’s not the main reason for the ban, officials said.
“We’re a health care provider, and we need to promote good health,” said CEO Grubbs.
The ban’s first day, Nov. 15, is also the day of the Great American Smokeout.
You can call reporter Susan Schwartz at 752-3646 or e-mail her at Susan.S@pressenterprise.net.

?