Sighting scrubs-clad health care professionals lighting up outside your local hospital will soon be a thing of the past. The Wisconsin Hospital Association Board of Directors hopes to snuff out those butts. “We are asking our member hospitals, that by November of 2007, that they be smoke free campus-wide,” says WHA Board Chair Mary Starmann-Harrison.
Some 50 of the state's 132 hospitals have smoking bans in their main hospital buildings, another 70 have the campus-wide restriction, and Starmann-Harrison says the remainder of the state's hospitals are already in the process of putting bans in place. She expects to have 100% compliance with this voluntary effort and says hospitals have detailed plans in place in order to go smoke free.