Smokers account for a quarter of all women working in Japan's health-care profession, a rate that is nearly double that for adult females nationwide, according to a Japanese Nursing Association survey.
"The results are shocking," an association official said Sunday. "It is troublesome that nurses, who are involved in health improvement, have a high smoking rate."
The poll was conducted by the association in August at 88 medical facilities nationwide on 6,507 female health-care workers, including nurses and midwives.
The smoking rate for female health-care workers was 24.5 percent, compared with 13.4 percent for the general female adult population, a figure that was obtained during a 1998 survey conducted by the then Health and Welfare Ministry.
Meanwhile, a survey of 300 men working in health care found that while they were more than twice as likely to smoke as their female counterparts, the difference between them and men in the general population was slight -- with 54.4 percent of male health workers lighting up compared with 52.8 percent of male adults in general.
Among the female smokers in the medical field, 60.5 percent said they smoke when they get nervous, 27.7 percent when they want to relieve tension and 18.8 percent when they want to become more alert, the survey said.
While 63.3 percent recognize the dangers of smoking, with some saying, "It is not good for the health of fetuses and children," only 12.6 percent of them replied that they want to quit smoking right away.
The association plans to launch stop-smoking courses for health workers to lower their high smoking rates.