The medical school and smoking.

Abstract

To examine the social environment of the medical school as it relates to smoking, tape-recorded interviews were conducted with 92 medical students at the University of Manchester. The medical school provides a social setting unfavourable to smoking for many students, but for some non-smokers and many smokers countervailing forces lead to an expansion of the habit during training. Increased opportunity, the influence of peers and social factors, together with environmental stress, tend to encourage smoking. The necessary information about smoking is provided and this influences some, but in general the medical school fails to establish a social climate in which smokers would feel more strongly motivated to give up. Although most students accept in theory that non smoking is part of the doctor's role, this idea is not consistently presented to them during the course. Furthermore, it is not always seen in practice to be adhered to by members of staff, their role models, thus enabling the student who smokes to deny the relevance of his personal behaviour to his future role. Nor is this ameliorated by the students' perception of policy in the medical school as one of, at most, mild disapproval.