Tobacco smoking kills over 8 million people a year. The prevalence in people with Severe Mental Illness (SMI) is 16-56 % higher than the general population. Consequently, tobacco related conditions comprise ~ 48-53% of all deaths for people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, leading to a reduced life expectancy of 13-30 years. Additionally, they have significantly lower smoking cessation rates.
Positive Deviance is a ‘bottom up’ approach to improving health care quality, identifying individuals, communities or services demonstrating exceptionally good performance on particular measures, despite being exposed to the same constraints and challenges as others. For this Yorkshire and Humber ARC PhD, we are using it to identify effective methods of achieving smoking cessation within the SMI population, focused on acute mental health settings.
Following patient and public involvement work, we next plan to
• Identify top performing staff delivering smoking cessation.
• Explore aspects of exceptional care i.e., how they differ from service standards.
