BackgroundSmoking in people with mental health problems (MHPs) is an important public health concern as rates are two to three times higher than in the general population. While a strong evidence base exists to encourage and support smoking cessation in the wider population, there is limited evidence to guide the tailoring of interventions for people with MHPs, including minimal understanding of their needs. This paper presents findings from theoretically-driven formative research which explored the barriers and facilitators to smoking cessation in people with MHPs. The aim, guided by the MRC Framework for the development and evaluation of complex interventions, was to gather evidence to inform the design and content of smoking cessation interventions for this client group.MethodsFollowing a review of the empirical and theoretical literature, and taking a critical realist perspective, a qualitative approach was used to gather data from key stakeholders, including people with enduring MHPs (n = 27) and professionals who have regular contact with this client group (n = 54).Results There was a strong social norm for smoking in participants with MHPs and most were heavily addicted to nicotine. They acknowledged that their physical health would improve if they stopped smoking and their disposable income would increase; however, more important was the expectation that, if they attempted to stop smoking, their anxiety levels would increase, they would lose an important coping resource, they would have given up something they found pleasurable and, most importantly, their mental health would deteriorate. Barriers to smoking cessation therefore outweighed potential facilitators and, as a consequence, impacted negatively on levels of motivation and self-efficacy. The potential for professionals to encourage cessation attempts was apparent; however, they often failed to raise the issue of smoking/cessation as they believed it would damage their relationship with clients. The professionals’ own smoking status also appeared to influence their health promoting role.ConclusionsMany opportunities to encourage and support smoking cessation in people with MHPs are currently missed. The increased understanding provided by our study findings and literature review have been used to shape recommendations for the content of tailored smoking cessation interventions for this client group.

Calls for teaching and learning that cross subject boundaries have been making themselves heard in recent Higher Education literature in different national contexts. Communication is pivotal in any such learning encounter: it is in the process of negotiating meaning across disciplines that its rewards and challenges lie. And yet, the question of what characterises interdisciplinary classroom communication in the sector is little researched and little understood. How such interaction differs from that in the monodisciplinary university classroom is under-theorised. Adapting Applied Linguistic theory in Intercultural Communicative Competence (Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.) and drawing on a taxonomy of academic disciplines (Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R (2001). Academic tribes and territories.Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education/Open University Press.), the article proposes a model of Communicative Competence as a conceptual tool to shape thinking in developing and researching interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the university classroom.socialisation into a discipline subtly shapes ways of thinking and orientations to learning and that this can ultimately lead to mutual incomprehension when specialists from different subject domains try to collaborate. Advocates of interdisciplinary learning in HE make persuasive arguments for the provision of formal opportunities for learning that crosses subject boundaries in university curricula These arguments include: (i) the educational benefits of engaging critically with one's own discipline by viewing its limitations from another perspective, (ii) the fact that modern working patterns increasingly call for multi-professional team work, and (iii) that the pressing world challenges that confront us daily in the media (pandemics, water politics, global warming, famine, migration, international crime, etc.) require new, holistic approaches. Such advocates highlight the value of interdisciplinary learning as a way of assisting HE Institutions in preparing future graduates who have the ability to tackle such complex problems wisely.The conception of interdisciplinarity envisaged in this article is one that fits well with such aspirations and is one that involves collaborations between students from differing subject areas in pooling their disciplinary knowledge in addressing complex and significant, real world problems. The ability to understand and be understood by a diverse group of specialists is essential to such endeavours and, by implication, the form of interdisciplinarity under discussion is all about communication. Experience of this type of collaborative problem-solving would seem intuitively to hold potential for developing students' abilities in effective interdisciplinary interaction after graduation. But what does effective interdisciplinary interaction mean in practice?Research on interdisciplinarity in HE appears to be largely silent on the matter of what the pa...

This article has dual aims. First, it proposes an explicit focus on emotion as a means of enriching thinking about employee health and wellbeing in the higher education (HE) sector. Second, in order to bring conceptual clarity to a highly complex area, it presents and illustrates (using a fictional scenario) a framework for understanding emotion. The article begins with an overview of recent published research relevant to the HE workplace as an affective domain and argues that research with an explicit focus on emotion is a so far little exploited means of investigating aspects of working life in HE that have implications for health and professional practice. It then presents a conceptualisation that views emotion as a system within which individual and environmental factors interact in highly intricate ways in emotional experience (Lazarus in Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991, 1999). Viewed from this perspective 'emotions', as opposed to less powerful 'affects' (such as attitudes, beliefs and opinions), are uniquely relevant to physical and mental health. The article concludes by considering implications arising from this perspective on emotion for researchers and other practitioners in HE with an interest in how the university workplace impacts on the wellbeing of an increasingly diverse workforce.

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