Rainbow Preschool embraces Smokefree
Earlier this year the Little Lungs – Pūkahukahu Iti team met with Wendy-Anne Jarvis, Family Support Coordinator at Rainbow PreSchool. Wendy-Anne has been working at Rainbow for 19 years and wanted to share their Smokefree story….
Rainbow PreSchool is a safe place for children and their families and so we share a lot of things. We’ve been in the community a long time and I think we’re in an ideal position to offer advice and support to families. We agreed to pilot the Little Lungs – Pūkahukahu Iti programme and have since undertaken a range of activities to promote Smokefree in our community. These include: participating in World Smokefree Day, designating centre events Smokefree such as our 25th anniversary party and the annual Light Party. We’ve erected new Smokefree signage, incorporated messages into our newsletter and had Smokefree speakers to our coffee group. We’ve had no negative feedback about these initiatives. I’d like to think that the 2025 goal is realistic and we’d certainly like to continue to be part of achieving it.
“Along with the support of the Little Lungs team I'm sure we can help in a small way to achieve the 2025 goal”
I think talking to parents about smoking requires staff to be confident with the subject. For me this meant making a commitment to undertake Quit Card training. I did this in April 2015 and I would recommend it. The training was worthwhile; it provided just the right amount of knowledge for us to share comfortably with our families.