Nursing should look beyond just helping smokers quit and take a stronger stand on policy action against ‘Big Tobacco’, said visiting US nurse activist, Professor Ruth Malone.
A long-term researcher of the tobacco industry, Malone is also the founder of The Nightingales Nurses, which, since 2004, has protested at tobacco company shareholder meetings in the USA.
She said it was time to stop blaming the smokers and focus on policy action against a tobacco industry shown in court to have engineered cigarettes to make them even more addictive than they otherwise would be.
“I think what nurses really need to do is move the conversation beyond just looking at individual health behaviour and that smoking is bad for you.”
She said instead nurses should be pointing out to smokers that they, like so many, were swept up in an “industrially-created epidemic”.
“That gives people another reason to quit – that they don’t want to keep supporting the industry that’s doing this,” said Malone, who is chair of social and behaviour sciences research at the University of California, San Francisco.
She said she would love to see nurses playing a stronger role in policy action, particularly if New Zealand was serious about meeting its Smokefree 2025 goal.
“All the things you are currently doing are important, but they are not enough to get you there in this timeframe,” said Malone.
“You really have to be transforming that conversation, and policy measures are the most effective for rapidly reducing tobacco consumption and uptake (of smoking).” These policy measures include the push for plain packaging of cigarettes and tobacco.
“It’s not that I don’t think that smoking cessation is really important, but I also don’t think we can really get to the end of this by the one-by-one approach because I believe policy and changing the conversation are really the important things.”
She encouraged nurses to get involved in any way that was comfortable for them.
“They can raise tobacco with every single patient or person that they interact with as a client – always raise tobacco,” said Malone.
“They can educate themselves about the industry and raise the industry with the public and their patients, so they start that change in the conversation.
“If they smoke, as so many of us have and do, they can work on quitting. Know that it sometimes takes multiple tries, but it’s so worth it.”
Malone said she smoked for 16 years, and when she finally quit, it was partially because of a media campaign in California that helped her see that her smoking wasn’t just about her own “weakness” but also about an industry that had gone after her and others.
Since 1998, she has been researching “the millions and millions” of tobacco industry internal documents released as a result of court cases in the States.
Malone’s was brought to New Zealand by Smokefree Nurses Aotearoa New Zealand and ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), with the support of Auckland University of Technology.
