Public Health Framework for Smart Cities within the Comprehensive Approach to Sustainability in Europe: Case Study of Diabetes

European cities should address the climate change challenges, improving quality of life and reducing costs. They need potential smart and digital approaches. Public health (PH) has recognized climate change as a major challenge. The development of urban policies should be guided by evidence-based PH practices. The environmental health determinants and the climate crisis now represent a clear PH threat. The core of the Smart City is sustainability, and its basic condition is active PH. The inclusion of public health into the pillars of the Smart City concept to contribute toward mitigating PH crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is a framework for action. Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) is used to elicit a Smart Public Health City (SPHEC) framework. A set of PH and smart city experts participated in the DSRM process, using diabetes as a case study. The European Green Deal served as a blueprint for this transformational change toward a healthier and more sustainable city. The SPHEC framework was defined by elucidating clearly the several dimensions of the PH functions within a digital city, via the identification of a set of digital PH services that are required to support the SPHEC framework. This allows for an assessment of the actual benefits that are obtained with the digital health services, and provides evidence for guiding decision-making. The role of digital PH services emerges from the analysis of the SPHEC framework, through the development of proper digital health services within the smart city, strengthening capacity and resilience in future climate emergencies, and motivating policy makers to take this challenge more seriously. © 2023 by the authors.

Multiple hazards and risk perceptions over time: the availability heuristic in Italy and Sweden under COVID-19

The severe impact of global crises, such as COVID-19 and climate change, is plausibly reshaping the way in which people perceive risks. In this paper, we examine and compare how global crises and local disasters influence public perceptions of multiple hazards in Italy and Sweden. To this end, we integrate information about the occurrence of hazardous events with the results of two nationwide surveys. These included more than 4000 participants and were conducted in two different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic corresponding to low (August 2020) and high (November 2020) levels of infection rates. We found that, in both countries, people are more worried about risks related to experienced events. This is in line with the cognitive process known as the availability heuristic: individuals assess the risk associated with a given hazard based on how easily it comes to their mind. Epidemics, for example, are perceived as less likely and more impactful in Italy compared to Sweden. This outcome can be explained by cross-country differences in the impact of, as well as governmental responses to, COVID-19. Notwithstanding the ongoing pandemic, people in both Italy and Sweden are highly concerned about climate change, and they rank it as the most likely threat.

Encountering Covid-19 and perceived stress and the role of a health climate among medical workers.

Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 epidemic, work stress among health sector employees has risen too high. The study aims at determining the effect of the current coronavirus epidemic in the form of stress perceived among the medical workers in Pakistan and to discover the moderating role played by a healthy climate in offsetting it. The data was collected from 255 medical workers through a self-administered online questionnaire. Multiple Hierarchical Regression was used as a tool to test the hypotheses of the study. The results obtained indicate a correlation between the pandemic and the stress caused by it among the health workers, whereas, the role of a wholesome climate in the reduction of stress among them was found lacking. Sub-hypotheses indicate that the healthy environment provided by supervisors is effective in reducing the impact of workers' handling of the Covid-19 epidemic and perceived stress, while the healthy environment provided by hospitals in general or by workgroups fails to cause such positive change. This revelation necessitates the adoption of compulsory precautionary measures on the part of relevant authorities, because increase in stress caused by the pandemic can prove more lethal than the pandemic itself. The threat of the coronavirus pandemic has emerged as a massive socio-economic challenge for the global community, especially for the developing countries like Pakistan which faces serious socio-economic challenges in the current scenario. On account of the similarity of situations, the results obtained through this study can be safely generalized to other developing countries, particularly from the South Asian region.

Do Organizational Health Climates and Leader Health Mindsets Enhance Employees' Work Engagement and Job Crafting Amid the Pandemic?

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many health- and stress-related symptoms among employees, surprisingly few studies have assessed the effect of a health-promoting organizational climate or leadership on employee work outcomes. To fill this gap, our research proposed and tested a moderated mediation model involving perceived organizational health climate (POHC), leader health mindset (LHM), work engagement, and job crafting. Our propositions were tested using two-wave data collected from 301 South Korean employees. As predicted, POHC was positively related to employees' job crafting, and this relationship was mediated by work engagement. Moreover, the positive relationship between POHC and work engagement and the indirect effect of POHC on job crafting through work engagement were more pronounced when LHM was high than when it was low. These findings support the job demands-resources model and social exchange theory and have implications for helping employees maintain their work attitudes and behavior in times of crisis.

Total Worker Health® and Small Business Employee Perceptions of Health Climate, Safety Climate, and Well-Being during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic created workplace challenges for employee safety and health, especially in small enterprises. We used linear mixed-effects regression to examine changes in health climate, safety climate, and worker well-being, prior to the pandemic and at two timepoints during it. We also examined whether employees at organizations that had received a TWH leadership development intervention prior to COVID-19 would better maintain pre-pandemic perceptions of climates and well-being. The final study cohort consisted of 261 employees from 31 organizations. No differences were observed in mean outcome scores between the leadership intervention groups at any of the survey timepoints. We combined intervention groups to examine the difference across timepoints. Perceptions of health and safety climates remained stable across all timepoints. However, employee well-being scores declined between the pre-pandemic period and subsequent COVID-19 timepoints. These findings suggest that while small organizations continued to be viewed as supporting employees' health and safety over the course of the pandemic, well-being scores declined, indicating that other factors contributed to decreased well-being. The findings from this study have implications for small business leaders as they navigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health, safety, and well-being on their organizations and employees.