DO TERTIARY‐TRAINED NURSES SMOKE LESS THAN HOSPITAL‐TRAINED NURSES?

The prevalence of smoking among nurses is sometimes attributed to specific stressful conditions of work in the traditional hospital training program. Such conditions do not apply in recently introduced tertiary nurse training programs. In this study 204 final year student nurses from hospital-based training programs and from a College of Advanced Education were questioned about their smoking behaviour. Thirty six per cent of the total sample were current smokers, 33 per cent had quit the habit and 32 per cent had never smoked. Over 75 per cent of current smokers began smoking before they started nurse training. No statistically significant differences in smoking behaviour were observed between the tertiary and hospital trained groups. This result should be interpreted with caution, because of the small number of nurses studied, and the limited number of institutions which were sampled. However, it is consistent with evidence from other sources, that the factors which lead most nurses to smoke lie in theirexperiences prior to nursing, and not in the nature or location of their training program. This issue has important implications for health promotion work with nurses, and warrants investigation on a larger scale.