Scientists at the University of Aberdeen are leading a major study to investigate the impact Scotland’s forthcoming smoking ban might have on the health of the nation’s bar staff.
The University’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine is heading up the £140,000 evaluation which will examine whether bar workers’ health improves after the ban comes into force.
NHS Health Scotland is funding the research – believed to the largest study of its kind in the world – which also involves the Institute of Occupational Medicine and researchers at the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow.
The Bar workers’ Health and Environmental Tobacco Smoke Exposure or BHETSE Project is part of the overall NHS Health Scotland strategy to evaluate the effect of the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Bill that will introduce a smoking ban in most substantially enclosed public places from this Sunday, March 26.
Dr Sean Semple, a Lecturer at the University’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, said: “Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke or ETS is a cause of considerable ill-health with recent estimates suggesting that ETS causes between 1,500 and 2,000 non-smoker deaths every year in Scotland.
“Workers in the hospitality sector have particularly high levels of ETS exposure and the introduction of smoke-free legislation in other countries suggests that hospitality workers may quickly experience improvements in respiratory health.
“A small study in San Francisco showed improvements in lung function within eight weeks of a ban introduced there in 1998, while researchers in Ireland have found that the proportion of bar-workers reporting respiratory symptoms fell from 26 to 7% in the 12 months following their ban.
“Our study sets out to find out whether the health of workers in Scotland’s bars does improve after the ban is implemented.”
Scientists have spent the last four months gathering data on bar-workers’ lung function using a device which measures lung capacity and how much air people can expel from their lungs in one second. Respiratory symptoms have also been assessed using a validated questionnaire. The project team has also collated details of bar-workers’ perceptions of the health effects of second-hand smoke and their attitudes to the forthcoming ban.
The information was gathered when researchers interviewed and spoke to more than 350 bar workers in over 60 pubs in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borders.
The team will be going back to repeat their survey two months after the implementation of the ban, and then again at the beginning of 2007, so that any influence of seasonality on health can be discounted.
Researchers have also been measuring indoor air quality within bars by measuring airborne levels of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. PM2.5 is formed by combustion processes and is a widely accepted marker of tobacco smoke concentrations. Together with their lung function data, these measurements will enable them to determine if there are greater improvements in bar-workers’ health in those bars that experienced the greatest reduction in tobacco smoke levels.
Initial findings show that some bar-workers are exposed to full-shift PM2.5levels that are, on average, 4 times the ‘hazardous’ Air Quality Index level set by the US government Environmental Protection Agency.
The study also hopes to determine if bar-workers who smoke are encouraged to give up smoking and also to examine whether the experience of working in a smoke-free environment has influenced their attitudes towards the ban.
The University of Aberdeen’s Health Economics Research Unit will also evaluate the economic benefits of any short-term health improvements among this group of workers. This part of the study is being conducted by Dr Anne Ludbrook, who also led a major review of the health and economic impacts of the regulation of smoking in public places. This earlier study helped advise the Scottish Parliament ahead of the introduction of the Smoking, Health and Social Care Bill.
It is hoped that some initial findings of the BHETSE project will be available this summer with a full analysis complete by spring next year.