Sharon Hosford, a petite woman with fiery red hair and a bright smile, is not a fan of smokers.
Hosford has chronic pulmonary disease — an ever-worsening condition that makes breathing difficult. She takes two buses every day to go from Derby to Hamden, where she works at Shaw’s Supermarket. Breathing second-hand smoke doesn’t help her condition.
Lately her annoyance with smokers has increased. There’s a bus stop on Maple Avenue on near her house, but she often avoids it, because it has become an informal smoking lounge for employees from nearby businesses.
Here’s the rub — the smokers are local health care workers, many of whom work at Griffin Hospital.
“I saw a doctor out there smoking,” Hosford said. “If he is a doctor shouldn’t he be practicing what he preaches.”
Obviously, health care workers who smoke outside hospitals creates a touchy public relations scenario for hospital administrators.
It is an even touchier situation for the nicotine-addicted health care workers, as I learned on a sunny day in March at the bus stop — outside the Griffin emergency room — when I was verbally assaulted for asking Griffin workers not to step inside the bus station shelter to smoke.
Here’s what happened:
I was tired of standing off to the side of the bus shelter with my six year-old asthmatic child, sometimes in the rain, so he wouldn’t inhale second hand smoke from the health care workers who often converged in semi-circles at the bus stop.
In mid-March on a very sunny day, I made an attempt to stand up to the smokers. I first told a group of four that I was tired of them using the bus station to smoke. A young man berated me for being angry and said he smoked, but exercised regularly. He also told me that he was an asthmatic too.
I told him to stop smoking if he had asthma.
After the confrontation, an elderly man who had been watching but standing a few feet away thanked me because he was an asthmatic who couldn’t sit at the bus station because of the smoking. He appreciated my standing up to the smokers.
Suddenly, another group of three woman came over and stood behind the bus station and lit up. The woman were dressed in hospital work clothes. One proclaimed she was cold and stepped inside the bus station. I asked to her not to smoke inside the bus station.
I was not prepared for what was about to happen.
She exploded with rage. She told me to shut up, to mind my business and that it was her “freedom” to smoke wherever she wanted. I asked her if she was taking the bus and she said it didn’t matter.
She began pointing her finger in my face and telling me “You’re messing with the wrong person.” and to “get the (expletive deleted) on the bus.”
I never got on the bus. What stuck in my mind was that one of the women said that she wasn’t going to stop smoking at the bus station until she sees it in writing.
Well, here are the first few paragraphs of a memo hospital president and CEO Patrick Charmel sent to all employees on Nov. 19, 2008.
“As you know, Griffin Hospital will be adopting a tobacco-free campus policy effective Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008 in conjunction with the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout day.”
“The policy will apply to the hospital and all of its entrances/exits, surrounding buildings, sidewalks, and parking lots. As I noted in my August letter announcing this new policy, it is consistent with our mission of improving the health of the individuals and communities we serve, and we are committed to doing everything we can to support a smooth transition to a smoke free campus.”
The hospital’s policy clearly states smoking is prohibited on the sidewalks surrounding the hospital buildings. The policy is clearly being ignored by the workers smoking at the bus stop.
Why that is happening is not clear.
Griffin is one of many hospitals across the state which have adopted smoke-free policies. There are about 14 hospitals in the state that have taken the further step of banning smoking on the grounds outside the hospital. Griffin also falls into that category.
“Obviously, hospitals are health care facilities. They would prefer that ambient smoke be something that is not a bother to patients, visitors and others who come to the hospital,” said Leslie Gianelli, spokesperson for the Connecticut Hospital Association. “Some hospitals have gone as far as to work with city government to pass local ordinances to ban smoking on sidewalks the hospitals do not own.”
While Griffin’s written policy mentions the sidewalks around the hospital, Derby does not appear to have a local ordinance banning the practice on the public sidewalks surrounding the hospital.
Griffin, consistently named one of the best places to work by Fortune magazine, offers programs to help employees kick the smoking habit.
“The hospitals aren’t trying to enforce certain behavior on peoples’ private lives,” she said. “The hospitals aren’t saying you must quit smoking. It’s a very difficult habit to break.”
New Haven has been more successful in restricting smoking outside hospitals, said resident Keith Richardson, who commutes to work in Ansonia every day.
He said he sees staff from Yale-New Haven and St. Rafael in New Haven smoking across the street from the hospital, away from the bus stops.
Health care workers as a smoking lounge outside a hospital just doesn’t make sense, Richardson said.
“That’s not nice or considerate,” Richardson said. “That’s why the world is the way it is. People don’t respect other people.”
