Tobacco control policies in hospitals before and after the implementation of a national smoking ban in Catalonia, Spain

BACKGROUND Diverse projects and guidelines to assist hospitals towards the attainment of comprehensive smoke-free policies have been developed. In 2006, Spain government passed a new smoking ban that reinforce tobacco control policies and banned completely smoking in hospitals. This study assesses the progression of tobacco control policies in the Catalan Network of Smoke-free Hospitals before and after a comprehensive national smoking ban. METHODS We used the Self-Audit Questionnaire of the European Network for Smoke-free Hospitals to score the compliance of 9 policy standards (global score = 102). We used two cross-sectional surveys to evaluate tobacco control policies before (2005) and after the implementation of a national smoking ban (2007) in 32 hospitals of Catalonia, Spain. We compared the means of the overall score in 2005 and 2007 according to the type of hospital, the number of beds, the prevalence of tobacco consumption, and the number of years as a smoke-free hospital. RESULTS The mean of the implementation score of tobacco control policies was 52.4 (95% CI: 45.4-59.5) in 2005 and 71.6 (95% CI: 67.0-76.2) in 2007 with an increase of 36.7% (p < 0.01). The hospitals with greater improvement were general hospitals (48% increase; p < 0.01), hospitals with > 300 beds (41.1% increase; p < 0.01), hospitals with employees' tobacco consumption prevalence 35-39% (72.2% increase; p < 0.05) and hospitals that had recently implemented smoke-free policies (74.2% increase; p < 0.01). CONCLUSION The national smoking ban appears to increase tobacco control activities in hospitals combined with other non-bylaw initiatives such as the Smoke-free Hospital Network.