As a Smoke Free Ambassador, Paulette Richards has to approach smokers on the UM/Jackson campus and ask them to put out their cigarettes. She truly knows of what she speaks -- a long-time smoker herself, Richards has had to make drastic changes since the campus went smoke free on March 1.
"I have said to a couple of people, ‘I am a smoker and I understand how it feels, and I understand how difficult it is,' and for the most part people have been very gracious,'' Richard says. "One woman even apologized because she didn't know about the new policy.''
Just a month into the policy, Richards has personal evidence that it is meeting its goal of helping smokers quit and improving their health. She's already gone from smoking about a dozen cigarettes a day to only two.
"I really don't have time to walk somewhere to smoke, so it's really strange,'' she says. "When you have no choice, you do what you have to do. It's been great. If I didn't have to follow the new policy, I know for a fact I would still be lighting up when I'm walking from one building to another for a meeting."
The executive administrative manager for the UM Global Institute for Community Health and Development, Richards was given the opportunity to become involved with the smoke free initiative by Barth A. Green, M.D., faculty chair of the Global Institute, and Arthur M. Fournier, M.D., program director of the UM Area Health Education Center (AHEC), which implemented and continues to oversee the policy. Richards works closely with both doctors because Green, professor and chair of neurosurgery, and Fournier, professor of family medicine and associate dean for community health affairs, are co-founders of Project Medishare, sister organization of the Global Institute dedicated to improving health care access in Haiti.
She also has another personal motivation.
"My husband is still a smoker - even though he has emphysema - so, now we are working together on cutting back and eventually quitting altogether," says Richards. "We know the policy can be very stressful on campus visitors with ill family members, so we are careful to guide them to an area off campus that is close by, where they can still smoke."
The past three months have been doubly stressful for Richards because, in her full-time job with the Global Institute, she has been an integral member of the Haiti Relief Task Force, which helped Project Medishare establish a 240-bed hospital in Port-au-Prince nine days after the January 12 earthquake devastated the Haitian capital. You may recognize her name as the person responsible for coordinating the database for doctors, nurses, therapists and other medical personnel who have been signing up to volunteer there.
"At the very beginning, it was overwhelming because their only point of contact was my e-mail address, and each day I would get more than 300 e-mails to process," remembers Richards. "Eventually IT was able to build a separate Web site, which people could access and register to volunteer. Right now, we have more than 4,700 people in the database from all over the world still willing to help."
Before joining UM in 2006, Richards worked for Intel, the world's largest microprocessor company, at its Folsom, California, location and was used to collaborating with different departments, a skill that has served her well.
"There isn't anything I don't do,'' she says. "Whatever needs to get done, I am willing to jump in and help make it happen."
Even asking fellow smokers to join her in trying to kick the habit.
