If you’re one of the approximately 140.000 employees in the country’s regions, you may before long look forward to a total ban on smoking during working hours. The board of Danish Regions have agreed that, from 2020, must be forbidden to light a fag, whether you are physically at the workplace, sitting in the car on the way to a meeting or take a hjemmearbejdsdag.
the Extra Leaf has asked the vice-president of Danish Regions and international architects in the Region Nordjylland, Ulla Astman (S), how such a ban should be enforced.
You say to Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, that there must be rigid checks in people’s own homes, but to the smoking ban, of course, must be enforced. How should it be done?
– We will not run around and play police at the home of the people, as little as we will run around to offices during working hours and check whether the employees had to have sinned.
– I have it such that when we enter into some agreements with people, then we do it in mutual trust and obligation. And therefore we would like to discuss with our staff how we get it implemented, so you also respect it, when, for example, are at home themselves and are working, says Ulla Astman (S).
– What will the consequence be if an employee breaks the smoking ban?
– we would like to discuss further with our staff, and therefore we have not specified how it should be enforced and what the penalties should be.
– We’ve had non-smoking sections in my own region for several years now, and it has to my knowledge been the case that if someone has violated it, then you have taken a dialogue with them in order to help them to become smoke-free. I’m not familiar with that which has been given fyresedler or similar, says Ulla Astman.
– If you do not want to control people and not put you firmly on the utmost consequence to a breach of the ban, how will you ensure you that it will be complied with?
– I trust that the mutual, forpligtigende agreements are complied with, and if they are blatantly being violated, then we will of course take a dialogue with the staff member about it. We work with health and is of course aware, as all other danes, that it is unhealthy to smoke, it costs a great many behandlingskroner and many years of life lost, as everyone is, why we’re doing it here effort, says Ms. Astman.
