A roadmap to a toolkit: exploring intervention opportunities for tobacco and cannabis co-use in the Further Education sector

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This fellowship aims to build a roadmap to a co-use toolkit - what does this mean? My PhD used a variety of research methods (systematic review, survey and individual interviews) to understand how young adults who use tobacco and cannabis understood their experiences of each, and how they made choices about reducing or stopping them. I learned that few used any support. In this fellowship, I will take these findings back to the young adults directly and to other researchers, to start a conversation about what the next steps should be; using co-production methods. By the end of the fellowship, I will produce a 'roadmap', showing the steps required to get from A to B, that is; from my ideas based on my PhD findings to a fully developed set of evidence based, co-produced resources: a 'tobacco and cannabis co-use toolkit'. This toolkit could be accessed by young adults, and people who work with young adults, to help make safer choices about substance use, and to reduce the harms they might experience. I already have some ideas about what might be in this toolkit based on the findings of the studies in my thesis, but my ideas alone aren't enough, I need to share them to make sure I'm taking the right approach. What am I proposing? In my PhD research, I asked a lot of questions of young adults, using a survey and interviews. However, I didn't get the chance to go back to those who were involved, nor to the colleges where they studied, to say 'thank you - this is what I learned from you all'. But I don't want to just get people to listen to me - I want to hear what they think about what I've found out, what surprises them or doesn't make sense, and what they have already tried to help them reduce their substance use, and what they did or didn't like. I will deliver two 'knowledge exchange' workshops to staff and students- a first with initial ideas, the second after I've gathered information and resources, which will help me to plan the next steps. I also want to write up my results for other researchers, and present my findings at conferences, to hear what other researchers think and to learn about similar studies. I'd like to visit another research institute that has done similar work to see first hand how they start designing support to help co-users, and maybe use some of their materials - I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Why is this important?Amongst all the substances young adults might use, tobacco and cannabis are two of the most common; bothpose risk to our physical and mental health. Young adulthood represents the age when people typically move from occasional use to more regular or dependent and therefore harmful use, so it is a key time to offer help and support to make safer choices and change use patterns. For example, we know that tobacco smoking is very harmful, and that cannabis use can create real difficulties for some people, but that understanding of the potential harms of cannabis vary widely.Although tobacco and cannabis are very often used together (most people who use cannabis in the UK use it with tobacco) smoking and cannabis services tend to address only one. Young adults might not seek support from existing services designed to address substance use, so we need to find new ways, routes and places to offer help. Problematic use of substances often sits alongside other problems like mental health, , and my PhD findings also showed how much who you are - your ethnicity, sexuality, academic achievement and where you live - might influence your substance use. When thinking about how to help young adults, we need to better understand how to consider all of these factors.Using my conversations with young adults and other researchers, I can develop proposals for specific elements of the toolkit. This might be a teaching pack for a lesson teachers can use; or a mobile phone app which helps someone reduce their substance use. There is no single intervention which fits all - this is why we