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Current issues of Publishers' Weekly are reporting serious shortages of paper, binders board, cloth, and other essential book manufacturing materials. Let us assure you these shortages are very real and quite severe.

I left Cambridge in 1962 without having sat‐in, stayed‐out, marched or boycotted. By 1967 the protest jargon of Berkeley, the philosophy of Marcuse, and the revolutionary antics of foreign undergraduates had spread to Britain. We were told about ‘Teach‐Ins’ and ‘Love‐Ins’, and the student world will never be the same again. With customary arrogance and optimism I am going to attempt to explain how this change occurred and to describe the thinking of students in Britain today.

The police service in London report a commitment to inspiring confidence from, and responding to the needs of black and minority ethnic communities. They are also committed to tackling the supply of crack cocaine and heroin, with which members of the Jamaican and Turkish communities respectively are strongly identified. Members of these communities report concerns about drug supply issues, but are extremely reluctant to co‐operate with the police to address them because they perceive that they are unfairly targeted, particularly by the stop and search strategy. The challenge is to implement a long‐term, community engagement programme with strategic level commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore factors associated with body weight gain among British university students who were members of a slimming club.

Student members of a national commercial slimming programme completed an online survey about cooking ability, weight gain, eating habits and physical activity levels. Non-parametric statistical tests and regression analysis were employed to examine factors associated with weight gain.

The data set comprised 272 current students. The majority of students (67 per cent) reported weight gain between 3.2 and 12.7 kg during studying in university: 20.4 per cent reported to have gained >12.7 kg. Students commonly attributed their weight gain to academic stress and nearly all identified with needing support to learn to cook on a budget. Students reporting greatest weight gain had most frequent consumption of ready meals & convenience foods, take-away & fast foods and least frequent consumption of fruits & vegetables. Weight-stable students reported lowest consumption of alcohol and were most able to cook complex meals. Students who reported greatest weight gain reported lower physical activity levels. There were inter-correlations between cooking ability and lifestyle factors. In a multivariate model, low physical activity and frequent consumption of ready meals and convenience food independently predicted weight gain.

Weight gain was inversely associated with diet quality, cooking ability and physical activity with reliance on ready meals & convenience food and low physical activity particularly important. Prospective studies are needed to confirm these cross-sectional associations and to explore how the university setting may contribute to the effect.

The study adds additional perspective to understanding student weight gain at university in that it focuses on a body weight-conscious sub-group of the student population, as opposed to the general population of students.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

This paper aims to examine the barriers and facilitators of conducting and implementing research in frontline child and youth mental health settings in the UK.

Researchers, clinicians and commissioners who attended a workshop at the Big Emerging Minds Summit in October 2022 provided their expert views on the structural barriers and possible solutions to integrating research in clinical practice based on their experiences of child and young people mental health research.

The identified barriers encompass resource constraints, administrative burdens and misalignment of research priorities, necessitating concerted efforts to foster a research-supportive culture. This paper proposes the potential actionable solutions aimed at overcoming challenges, which are likely applicable across various other health-care systems and frontline NHS services. Solutions include ways to bridge the gap between research and practice, changing perceptions of research, inclusive engagement and collaboration, streamlining ethics processes, empowering observational research and tailored communication strategies. Case examples are outlined to substantiate the themes presented and highlight successful research initiatives within NHS Trusts.

This paper provides an insight into the views of stakeholders in child and youth mental health. The themes will hopefully support and influence clinicians and academics to come together to improve the integration of research into clinical practice with the hope of improving service provision and outcomes for our children and young people.

As the beliefs people hold exert more influence over their behaviour than any other single factor, the purpose of this paper is to elicit those held by service users about being cared for in acute mental health settings.

Data were collected by means of a semi‐structured, non‐standardised, 17‐item interview schedule from an opportunistic sample of 44 respondents (18 men and 26 women) following their admission over a nine‐month period.

Findings suggest that those admitted to acute care settings harbour very different beliefs about what to expect, what is being offered and how it will affect them. While some respondents saw admission as an event simply to be endured, others saw it as a means of gaining relief, accessing better care and treatment as well as providing respite for their families. Whereas previous knowledge and experience of acute care did influence their beliefs, this was largely due to how they interpreted experiences rather than the experiences themselves. The data also suggest that service users can be assisted to reframe their beliefs by means of genuine, consistent and empathic relationships, thus putting services users in a position to derive maximum benefit from being admitted.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the beliefs that service users have on entry to mental health services, in comparison to that paid to problem‐identification, care planning and intervention regimens. A starting point for any health care intervention, especially mental health care, should be the identification of the beliefs held by those about to embark on treatment programmes. This area deserves much more attention than it has been given hitherto.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the impacts that service user involvement can have on the education of UK undergraduate student mental health nurses both personally and professionally. It reports the findings from a short module evaluation of a collaboratively delivered theory unit using a qualitative approach.

The study reports the findings from a short module evaluation of a collaboratively delivered theory unit using a qualitative approach embracing two focus groups.

The findings from the two focus groups highlight that the service user input (expert by experience) offered a positive learning experience for the students, enabled them to appreciate the meaning of recovery and hope and facilitated the identification of the importance of their role in terms of connecting meaningfully with those they are supporting and reconsidering key priorities for practice. They also suggest that there is theory/practice gap reduction as students were able to connect the service user narratives to the evidence base for deeper understanding and application.

Although only a brief evaluation of a short theory module within a wider programme involving a small number of participants, the findings echo the wider literature and offers further rationale to support direct service user involvement within mental health education across all healthcare professions. This finding is also relevant, as, increasingly, learning/teaching programmes now seek to implement blended learning with significant online teaching and less face-to-face facilitation of learning.

This study highlights not only the positive impact of service user input on health-care education but also the benevolent influence skilled narratives can have as a pedagogical approach to learning.

Although there is much in the literature as to the benefits for student learning in involving service users within higher education institute education, there is limited information as to “how” and “why” this is the case, this article seeks to bridge that gap.