Louisville-area health-care providers will go entirely smoke-free by 2008
Health-care providers across the Louisville metro area announced May 11 that their campuses will be completely smoke free by Jan. 1, 2008.
Local health-care providers banned indoor smoking in 1992, but many outdoor smoking areas were exempted. The new policy will extend the prohibition to all outdoor facilities at hospitals, outpatient centers, clinics, urgent-care centers, offices, laboratories and classrooms.
Participating facilities include Baptist Hospital East and Northeast; Jewish Hospital and St. Mary's HealthCare; Kindred Healthcare; Norton Healthcare and UofL Health Care.
Collectively, these providers have more 32,000 employees, volunteers, physicians and medical students, and see more than 2.6 million patient visits each year at 140 locations in Louisville and Southern Indiana.
Officials cited a number of benefits to the new policy, but the primary advantage will be the elimination of second-hand smoke, a known carcinogen with no minimum safe exposure level.
The end result will be safer, healthier environments
for both patients and employees, said Jim Taylor, president and CEO of University Hospital, a part of UofL Health Care.
"UofL Health Care will continue to offer a range of behavioral and pharmaceutical support to employees who have chosen to smoke," including free smoking-cessation classes and nicotine replacement therapies, Taylor added.
With the announcement, the health-care providers join UofL's Health Sciences Center campus, which went completely smoke-free in January 2004.
"We congratulate our fellow members of the Louisville health-care community on this announcement," said Larry Cook, M.D., UofL's executive vice president for health affairs.
"We will be renewing our commitment to a smoke-free campus by stepping up our effort to enforce our current policies and by encouraging our employees to take advantage of resources available to them.
"As educators of the next generation of physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals, it's vitally important that we encourage healthy behaviors, just as we train out students to encourage healthy behaviors in their patients and in the broader community."
Adewale Troutman, M.D., director of Louisville Metro Public Health and Wellness, praised the smoke-free announcement as an example of unparalleled cooperation between multiple providers.
"I've been in the business of health care for over 30 years, and I've never seen this kind of collaboration around such an extremely important community health issue anywhere," said Troutman, who also is an associate professor of public health at UofL.
Kentucky has the highest smoking rate in the nation, with 29 percent of adults reporting that they light up regularly. More than 430,000 Americans -- including 8,000 Kentuckians -- die each year as a result of tobacco use, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, and second-hand smoke kills more than 50,000 non-smokers annually.
