Tobacco use is among the most significant causes of chronic conditions in the US and the world. It is associated with higher risks of vascular diseases like hypertension, coronary disease, and stroke. It also increases the chances of cancer and asthma, among other illnesses. Chronic illnesses have become a severe burden to the US because of the growing numbers of aging people. In the US, about 18.7% (46 million) of adults use any of the various tobacco forms (CDC, 2022). The tobacco is consumed in traditional cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and hookah, among other forms. Even though the introduction of electronic and smokeless forms of tobacco reduces the effects, the users still face poorer health outcomes than non-smokers. Tobacco leads to general costs of about 300 billion dollars annually. About $225 billion is spent directly on healthcare issues (CDC, 2022). It also results in $156 billion worth of lost productivity. Therefore, the effects of the negative behavior are significantly adverse and need to be reduced by reducing adult smoking in the country.
Advance Practice Roles
one advanced practice role that affects change in communities is data collection. Nurses have to get information from patients and other sources and compile it to determine the extent of the issue. Data collection enables evidence-based practice. It also enables stakeholders to know how to prioritize their issues. Another strategy and role is advocacy. Advanced practice nurses can use their data and interactions with patients to know how to present issues to policymakers and push for policies (Khan et al., 2019). Advocacy requires that the professionals identify the appropriate stakeholders to work with and present issues to push for the required changes while supporting them with the available data. Advanced practice nurses also assess smoking habits and give patient education to patients. Patient education aims to cause behavior change among individuals.
Community Resources
Resources that enable smoking are the stores that sell cigarettes and other forms of tobacco. The stores that are available sell cigarettes to anyone who is above the legal age for smoking in the country (CDC, 2022). By stocking tobacco products, the stores promote smoking.
Resources that support quitting include quitlines. Quitlines are phone lines that people struggling to stop call to get information or encouragement from people in the lines. The American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute have quitlines. The originations are nonprofit and governmental organizations that advocate for policies that reduce chronic illnesses by supporting measures against quitting tobacco (CDC, 2022). The organizations have websites and phone lines that people use to reach out and get the various help forms they offer.
There are also community centers and hospitals that offer material and care against tobacco use. Hospitals offer education and direct people to where they can get resources (CDC, 2022). on the other hand, community centers offer resources like books and connections for affected people.
Changes
There need to be policy changes to reduce smoking. Policy changes affect the programs and resources that are available. Changing policies may cause increased taxation on cigarettes to discourage smoking. Health taxes are usually imposed on products that negatively affect people’s health, like cigarettes and alcohol, to increase the prices and reduce the product’s accessibility to people (Chaloupka et al., 2019). the money collected can also be invested in public health measures like increasing resource availability.
Strategic Plan
Policy change is one plan that can help resource accessibility and reduce smoking significantly. The plan’s goal should be to cause policy changes in tax measures to increase cigarette and other tobacco products’ prices to reduce people’s accessibility and improve care availability for the affected people. The various states currently have tobacco usage laws (Chaloupka et al., 2019). They limit the age for buying tobacco and the formulation of the substance that people can access. For instance, some states prevent the sale of flavored e-cigarettes.
To enable the passage of a policy that will increase the prices of tobacco products and require the use of money to increase the availability of resources, APNs should advocate for changes among policymakers. APNs should collect data on the prevalence of smoking and the smoking-related issues that need to be solved. They should also collect data from the community centers about the availability of resources and use the information to guide their representatives. The American Nurse Association should coordinate the process, which links nurses from the entire country. Policy changes should be achieved within a year. Therefore, to cause policy changes by January 2025, APNs should start data collection as soon as possible and write to their legislatures to lobby for the creation of a policy to increase taxes at the state and federal levels. The strategy’s progress should be measured based on achieving various milestones at various times that will be predetermined during the year.
Using advocacy for policy change as the strategy is important because it incorporates nurses’ knowledge about health literacy, cultures, and the socioeconomic differences that affect smokers. The smoking rates differ among the various ethnic groups. According to Nguyen-Grozavu et al. (2020), non-Hispanic whites and blacks lead smoking prevalences by 15.2% and 14.9%, respectively. Relatively fewer Latinos (9.9%) than whites and blacks smoke tobacco. Therefore, the money collected should be used to spread community resources in the various neighborhoods. The money from the policy changes will be collected from all smokers nationwide. Hence, people from various cultures will be affected depending on their levels of smoking and the health issues concerned. For people of lower socioeconomic status, they will be forced to reduce smoking. Those who continue smoking will contribute to the dollars that are used to cover the effects of tobacco smoking in the country.
Conclusion
The goal of the plan is to deter smoking and improve the accessibility of resources needed to combat smoking by increasing the taxes imposed on smoking. Increased taxation will allow the government to collect more money on community resources and other programs against smoking. Using policy changes will ensure that the changes stick and last. However, opposition should be expected from the companies that manufacture tobacco products. They are likely to lobby against the policy changes. However, with the support of people based on the available data, policy changes are likely to happen.
References
CDC. (2022). Smoking and Tobacco Use. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/cost-and-expenditures.html
Chaloupka, F. J., Powell, L. M., & Warner, K. E. (2019). The use of excise taxes to reduce tobacco, alcohol, and sugary beverage consumption. Annual review of public health, 40, 187-201. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218-043816
Khan, J. S., Hah, J. M., & Mackey, S. C. (2019). Effects of smoking on patients with chronic pain: a propensity-weighted analysis on the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry. Pain, 160(10), 2374. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001631
Nguyen-Grozavu, F. T., Pierce, J. P., Sakuma, K. L. K., Leas, E. C., McMenamin, S. B., Kealey, S., … & Trinidad, D. R. (2020). Widening disparities in cigarette smoking by race/ethnicity across education level in the United States. Preventive medicine, 139, 106220. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2020.106220
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