Tobacco use to stop at hospitals

Hoping to improve local health and limit health-care costs, the New River Valley's hospitals are joining together and joining a growing number of businesses that limit tobacco use.
Representatives of HCA and Carilion announced Wednesday morning that their hospitals, physician practices and outpatient centers throughout the New River Valley would go tobacco-free Jan. 1 for employees and guests.
Those facilities include Carilion New River Valley Medical Center near Radford and HCA's Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg and Pulaski Community Hospital in Pulaski.
Carilion Giles Community Hospital will be tobacco-free when it opens in the spring.
Currently, employees and visitors must go outside the facilities to use tobacco products. Come Jan. 1, tobacco use will be discouraged inside and out.
The heads of three hospitals appeared Wednesday at the New River Valley Mall to discuss the initiative that they hope will save lives and cut down health-care costs.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly one in five U.S. deaths each year is a result of tobacco use, according to a media release.
Approximately $150 billion is spent each year in health care for smokers, said Jim Thweatt, interim chief executive officer at Pulaski Community.
And about 25 of all health-care costs are spent treating "modifiable" health risks, he said, including smoking.
"This is the right example to set for our community," said Don Halliwill, president of Carilion NRV, which employees about 1,000.
"People come [to hospitals] to get well," said Scott Hill, CEO of Montgomery Regional, where close to 600 work. "This is a no-brainer."
All three hospital chiefs said lessons were learned over the past two years from a similar joint effort in Roanoke.
In July 2007, the two companies' facilities in the Roanoke Valley went tobacco-free. Halliwill said the important lessons were take your time and communicate why with employees. That's why he said employees were given a year's notice of the decision to give them time to seek smoking-cessation programs.
"This is not a condemnation of individual personal choices," he said. "This is not a political decision."
Instead, he said, it was about giving employees, patients and visitors an "appropriate health-care environment."
Despite the announcement coming two years after the Roanoke Valley went tobacco-free and after General Assembly legislation mandated many restaurants go smoke-free on Dec. 1, Halliwill denies the New River Valley is behind the times.
Nationally, he said, only about 50 percent of hospitals are tobacco-free. By year-end, he said, that will be 70 percent in Virginia.
"We're not behind," he said. "We were just ahead of the curve in Roanoke."