If you are a smoker, forget about working at Saint Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau.

The hospital will no longer hire smokers beginning Jan. 1.

Saint Francis' "Current Openings" page on its website, includes a nicotine-free hiring policy. When logging on to the employment site, prospective candidates are greeted with this message:

"Because it is important for health care providers to promote a healthy environment and lifestyle, effective January 1, 2011, Saint Francis Medical Center has a nicotine-free hiring policy," the page states. "Applicants will be tested for nicotine as part of a pre-employment screening.

"I understand that my application will not be considered if I use tobacco products."

The policy change will not affect current employees, though they will continue to be offered access to tobacco cessation programs and incentives, the hospital said in a statement.

The new policy is part of Saint Francis Medical Center's Healthier Us initiative, "and builds on the optional employee wellness program Healthy Rewards, in which employees earn incentives for making healthy lifestyle changes and choices," according to the statement.

Saint Francis would join a select group of Missouri health care centers. Dave Dillon, spokesman for Missouri Hospital Association said he knows of only one other hospital in the state, Truman Medical Center in Kansas City, with a similar policy.

"It's likely that other hospitals will make other moves like this, if they haven't already," he said.

Shane Kovac, spokesman for Truman Medical Centers' two hospitals, said its tobacco-free hiring policy was implemented in 2006 and modeled after the Cleveland Clinic, a medical center based in Ohio, which he said was the first health care provider in the nation to prohibit smokers from applying.

"It came out of our CEO's changing of the culture, that if we are going to be a place of health, wellness and healing, we needed to, as he says, walk the walk," Kovac said. He noted current employees who smoke are grandfathered in, but prospective employees in the online application process must check a box that says they are not and will not use tobacco products.

"The letter on line says why you cannot go any further in the application process, and that we wish you well in your endeavors," Kovac said. The hospital does not have a nicotine test, but rather relies on an honor system, the spokesman said.

SoutheastHEALTH, operator of Southeast Hospital, does not have similar policy, but it has been a tobacco-free campus since September 2006, according to Debbie Bowers, the hospital's human resources director. Saint Francis is not a smoke-free campus and designates smoking areas and shelters for employees and visitors no closer than 50 feet of any public entrance.

Missouri labor law mandates employers cannot refuse to hire or they cannot fire an employee for alcohol or tobacco use after working hours off company property.

"Meaning that if someone is up for a job interview and they smelled like smoke, the employer cannot not hire you because you are a smoker; that's against the law," said Amy Susan, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. Not-for-profit hospitals and church-related organizations, however, are exempt from the code.

More private-sector employers nationwide are making smoking a prohibitive clause in their hiring policies.

Massachusetts Hospital Association an employer of 45 that announced earlier this month it would no longer hire people who smoke, according to a recent story in the Christian Science Monitor. The firm is the first private employer in Massachusetts to take such a step, though several others elsewhere, including Alaska Airlines and Union Pacific Railroad, have stopped hiring smokers, the Monitor story noted.

There are significant costs to the economy to consider, anti-smoking advocates say.

Action on Smoking and Health, a not-for-profit anti-smoking and nonsmokers' rights group, says employees who smoke cost their companies $12,000 a year unnecessarily.

"These are dollars which could instead be used to provide more health care benefits to all employees, higher salaries, or to increase company profits," the organization says on its website.

Truman Medical Center's Kovac said the hospital has not had any legal challenges or real objectives from its non-smoking hiring policy.

"We have seen that initially [prospective employees] were upset, but then they realized what the upside is, the health of patients and staff," he said. "Our HR department says they do not have any recollection of any major pushback against this.

"I think if we had not grandfathered our current employees in, that would have been a new story."

mkittle@semissourian.com

388-3627