Nurses turn the tables on the tobacco industry

Nurses turn the tables on the tobacco industry

The New Zealand Nurses Organisation is presenting this week to the Maori Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the tobacco industry. The professional association, which represents 44,000 members, believes nurses have a huge role to play in helping Maori and other Kiwis quit – and they are on a mission to do just that. Kerri Nuku is the NZNO’s Kaiwhakahaere. Here she explains why there’s a certain irony in nurses uniting against the tobacco industry.

Nurses see first-hand, on a daily basis, the terrible toll smoking has on our patients, their whanau and the wider community. That’s why we are in an ideal position to help. Research shows that advice and support from nursing staff can increase people’s success in quitting smoking, especially in a hospital setting. Significantly, we see the potential for Maori nurses to dramatically improve the quit rates amongst Maori, who bear the greatest burden of ill health and death caused by smoking.

A recent smoking and nursing survey conducted by the Auckland University of Technology and Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) found that 9 out of 10 nurses felt it was part of their responsibility to advise clients to stop smoking and most said they’d happily spend an extra five minutes with each patient who smoked if they could effectively intervene. The NZNO wants to support nurses to do this and to see smoking cessation advice and support as part of their daily practice.

We acknowledge and support Smokefree Nurses Aotearoa/New Zealand who have advocated for nurses to carry out this work. Thousands of nurses have already completed free training courses to give them greater confidence in approaching smokers under their care and offering them help to quit. These nurses can now also issue vouchers for subsidised nicotine replacement therapy to smokers. This is world-leading and shows the strong role New Zealand nursing organisations and the Ministry of Health are playing in equipping and empowering nurses as frontline educators.

While nurses are now actively supporting the Smokefree message, that hasn't always been the case. At one time our profession was blatantly used by the tobacco industry to promote its products.

As bizarre as it seems now, from around 1920 to 1950, nurses were shown handing out cigarettes to soldiers and even smoking themselves while personally endorsing the medicinal qualities of certain brands.

One ad shows a smiling, rosy-cheeked nurse smoking a Camel cigarette and promoting its freshness. The text reads “You like them fresh? So do I!” By using such images the ads were intended to provide “evidence” that cigarette smoking was supported by medical professionals (there are countless ads featuring doctors as well) and to imply various health benefits from smoking, such as weight loss, relaxation and pleasure.

Knowing what we know now, it is unthinkable that nurses were once enlisted in tobacco industry propaganda but it seems there is no limit to the inventive ways the tobacco industry has come up with to sanitise and normalise its toxic products.

Those products are still blighting the lives of many New Zealanders, with Maori smoking rates unacceptably high, and this is where Maori nurses could make a significant difference.

We acknowledge however, that as well as addressing smoking in the wider community we also need to address it within our workforce. A number of nurses still smoke themselves and are often stigmatised and face more criticism than most over their addiction. As a first step we need targeted programmes to support nurses who smoke, to quit.

We believe a unified nursing profession taking the Smokefree message to the wards, clinics, workplaces, schools and homes will be a powerful force in further reducing New Zealand’s 5,000 a year death toll from smoking.

It will also be a long-overdue rebuke to the tobacco industry for once trading on our trustworthiness and credibility to sell their poison.

ENDS