Health Education and Activity - Lessening The Inequalities in mental health (HEA - LTI mental health).

Patients suffering from mental health illness have considerably more physical health disease burden than the rest of the population and are more likely to die 10 to 20 years younger compared with their peers. Diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease have been recognised as contributing factors to premature death. Furthermore patients with severe mental illness undertake lower levels of physical activity.

Smokefree streets: a pilot study of methods to inform policy.

Introduction: Smokefree street policies are relatively rare, and little has been published on the methods for establishing an evidence base to inform such policy making. We aimed to (a) pilot methods for such data collection in New Zealand, a country where local governments are actively pursuing outdoor smokefree policies and (a) to provide data on smoking behavior, attitudes toward smokefree policies, and levels of smoke exposure on streets in Wellington.

Methods: Three methods were piloted: (a) systematic observation of smoking behavior by observers walking a standard route of major streets, the "Golden Mile" (GM) in Wellington (n = 42 observation runs); (b) measurement of fine particulate levels (PM(2.