Hospitals in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas (among others), stopped hiring smokers in 2010 and more countries were openly considering doing so. Paul Terpeluk, a director at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said, “The trend line is getting pretty steep, and I’d guess that in the next few years you’d see a lot of major hospitals go this way.”[1] Indeed, this could come to be the case around the world. Various factors impact any comprehensive evaluation of a hospitals' policy against hiring smokers. The matter is therefore more complex than one might assume at first glance.
The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.
1. A. G. Sulzberger, “Hospitals Shift Smoking Bans
to Smoker Ban,” The New York Times,
February 10, 2011.