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The American Nurses Association / American Nurses Foundation is a collaborator with the Robert Wood Johnson-funded Tobacco Free Nurses Initiative. The Tobacco Free Nurses provides web-based resources 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for nurses and nursing students. The website (www.tobaccofreenurses.org) offers the latest research on cessation strategies and on tobacco control. It offers links to telephone quit lines and state-based resources, professional resources, including publications and presentations, and links with other tobacco control groups. Tobacco Free Nurses has a resource library with a listing of all articles on the many aspects of nursing and tobacco and a one-page fact sheet with key facts about nurses and tobacco.

In addition, Tobacco Free Nurses provides access to web-based cessation services through Nurses QuitNet. Nurses QuitNet offers an array of interactive and personalized services for nurses and nursing students who want to quit smoking, including private, confidential, one-on-one counseling. In sum, Tobacco Free Nurses is a one-stop shop for nurses who want to help their patients, colleagues, friends or family stop using tobacco; who are ready to quit, or want to join the campaign for a tobacco free society.

Since the launch, in February 2004, TFN website became one of the top picks under Google for nurses and tobacco. Visits to the site are steadily increasing, with over 25,000 page views in the month of February 2005 and a growing number on nurses visiting the Nurses QuitNet site.

On May 3rd, 2005 TFN through a collaboration with the Agency for Health Care Policy Research, launched a pocket guide to help nurses help patients with smoking cessation. This guide is based on the scientific-based principles of the Public Health Service’s Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence. Clinical Practice Guideline. This pocket guide, available through AHRQ at its website (http://www.ahrq.gov/path/tobacco.htm) may help hospital nurses, in particular, to meet the new tobacco cessation requirement from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations to intervene with patients with a heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. TFN recently developed a one page fact sheet that describes the JCAHO requirement and how TFN can help.

The theme of the World Health Organization’s World No Tobacco Day, May 31, 2005, focused on health care professionals and tobacco control, and TFN, including the partnership with ANA, was selected as one of the examples of a national initiative on how health care professionals can make a difference in tobacco control.

This fall, on our ongoing effort to support nurses and nursing students in becoming smoke free role models, TFN asked deans of all nursing schools to distribute a letter to the incoming class to raise awareness of the resources provided through TFN, including support for nursing students who are ready to quit using tobacco.