TY  - JOUR
T1  - Smoking among hospitalized patients: Another opportunity to improve patients' health: comment on “prevalence and predictors of smoking by inpatients during a hospital stay”
AU  - Schroeder SA
Y1  - 2012/11/26
N1  - 10.1001/2013.jamainternmed.308
JO  - Archives of Internal Medicine
SP  - 1675
EP  - 1676
VL  - 172
IS  - 21
N2  - 
Step by step it became more difficult for hospitalized smokers to smoke. Hospitals stopped selling cigarettes in their canteens (in the case of Veterans Affairs, this sparked an ongoing fight with the US Congress1). The Joint Commission mandated in 1992 that hospitals be smoke free; smoking rates among health care workers—even nurses—plummeted2; and medications for smoking cessation became widely available.3 An important loophole in the 1992 Joint Commission regulations was the exemption of psychiatric hospitals. However, recently they have begun to restrict smoking as well, even without a regulatory mandate to do so; between 2005 and 2011, the proportion of state mental hospitals that outlawed smoking inside the hospital increased from 20% to 79%.4

SN  - 0003-9926
M3  - doi: 10.1001/2013.jamainternmed.308
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/2013.jamainternmed.308
ER  -