The Ethics of No-Smokers Hiring Policies: Examining the Assumptions

Army nurses light up in 1947. Photo courtesy of Everett Collection / Newscom. Army nurses light up in 1947. Photo courtesy of Everett Collection / Newscom.

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

The Ethical Issues column in the June issue is called “The Ethics of Denying Smokers Employment in Health Care” (free until July 16). As in his previous columns, nurse–ethicist Doug Olsen models the thinking process of an ethicist, illuminating the fundamentals of ethical reasoning even as he tackles a specific ethical question.

Most positions we take on tough questions depend on a number of assumptions, both conscious and otherwise. In this article, Olsen does a great job identifying and then testing the assumptions that underlie such no-smokers hiring policies. Here are the main ones, as Olsen describes them:

2016-11-21T13:04:29-05:00June 16th, 2014|career, Ethics, nursing perspective|10 Comments
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Smoking, Nurses, Knowledge: We’ve Come a Long Way, But Not Far Enough

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

"Smoke break"/by sylvar, via Flickr “Smoke break”/by sylvar, via Flickr

Back in the day, I remember riding in the car with my parents, both of whom smoked. My siblings and I used to jockey for the window seats so we could be near the fresh air streaming in.  And I recall holidays with visiting relatives when all the adults would sit in the living room smoking cigarettes. (Kent filter-tips for the women; Camels for the men.) And as kids, we used to “smoke” candy cigarettes. The ones that “puffed” when you blew into them were our favorites.

But I also recall getting older and not wanting to visit my Uncle Joe, a once tough New York City police detective, because he would just sit on the edge of his chair, leaning over a table and struggling to breathe. This made my dad quit cold turkey after he had a heart attack at age 48 and our family physician told him he could either keep smoking or quit and see his children get married. My mom quit when she was pregnant with my youngest sister, after the surgeon general’s report said smoking could harm the fetus.

Our parents were constantly telling us that they wished they’d never started […]

2018-03-28T10:27:17-04:00January 22nd, 2014|nursing perspective|3 Comments
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When Loved Ones and Patients Don’t Choose Life

By Karen Roush, AJN clinical managing editor

Photo by the author Photo by the author

This isn’t the blog post I started out to write. That was a more personal story about someone close to me, let’s call this person Jess, who died after years of chronic illness worsened by self-neglect—after years of being that person Olsen talks about in this month’s article (free until August 15) on helping patients who don’t help themselves (and in his related blog post from last week).

But as I wrote, I realized that it wasn’t fair, that I was leaving out the complex story behind their persistent unhealthy behaviors, behaviors that eventually led to a lingering, awful death.

And without that background knowledge, it was too easy to be judgmental—as it is sometimes too easy for us as nurses to be judgmental of patients who don’t help themselves, who even seem to be willfully destroying their own health: the obese person who keeps drinking those giant sodas, the smoker who lights up another cigarette. As a nurse it can be very frustrating to care for a patient who ignores health recommendations, to their own detriment. As a family member or friend, it can be heartbreaking and infuriating.

There are limits to what we can do. We cannot force patients to eat well, take necessary medications, quit smoking, modify their alcohol intake, wear their seatbelts . . . the list goes on and on. Yes, we […]

2016-11-21T13:07:02-05:00July 15th, 2013|nursing perspective|4 Comments
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Tortoise and Hare: Top 15 AJN Blog Posts for Past Quarter

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

Dance Floor, via Flickr

We haven’t done as many posts as usual for the past few months. Various contributors are on the lam, vacationing, singing arias, earning PhDs, watching “Game of Thrones” episodes over and over and the like. So be it. 

But here is a list of the most popular posts over the past three months, in case you missed any of these at the time. Of necessity, since this is a blog, some are more ephemeral in their subject matter and relevance than others.

One or two, like “Do Male Nurses Face Reverse Sexism?”, are several years old but still hit the mark. Some were quick studies, grabbed all their readers in a matter of a few days and then tapered off quickly, while others came on slowly like the tortoise, steadily accumulating readers, asserting their charm via random Google searches.

Feel free to let us know what topics you’d like to see covered in the future. We can’t promise we can deliver, but it’s good to get a variety of perspectives. A greater clinical focus? More on policy? More on the nuts and bolts of nursing subspecialties? More personal narratives from nurses or patients? More posts related to recent published research? More polls? Trivial gossip about celebrities? To repeat: Let us know! And enjoy the early summer weekend.

“The Case of Amanda Trujillo”

“New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?”

“‘How Can You Bear to […]

2016-11-21T13:09:49-05:00June 22nd, 2012|healthcare social media|0 Comments
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E-Cigarettes: Positive Smoking Substitute or a New Problem Replacing the Old?

Photo by Michael Dorausch, via Flickr

By Michael Fergenson, senior editorial coordinator

The dangers of smoking cigarettes are well documented, from the terrifying commercials about what smoking does to our bodies to the warnings right on the pack. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 45.3 million people in the United States smoke.

Now, a new trend in tobacco products has become the center of much debate. I’m referring to the electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, that are gaining popularity as a smoking alternative and, for many, as a tool to quit.

I personally know two people who are using this device in an attempt to stop smoking. An article published in the New York Times last November reports that the number of Americans trying e-cigarettes “quadrupled from 2009 to 2010.” The article also cites the results of a survey published in Tobacco Control last year, which found that 1.2% of adults, or close to 3 million people, had reported using these products in the previous month. But are e-cigarettes really a positive smoking substitute and aid to quitting?

How they work. Most e-cigarettes are shaped like a real cigarette, but some have a unique look. They work by heating up a liquid—purchased […]

2017-03-10T16:53:37-05:00May 4th, 2012|Nursing|21 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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