Derek Christie

Community mobility refers to moving safely and independently within and beyond one’s neighbourhood to reach valued destinations, sustain social participation, and build a sense of belonging—key elements of positive ageing and ageing-in-place. For Europe’s growing population of older adults and people living with disabilities, community mobility supports physical and mental health, well-being, and quality of life. It includes active, motorised, and shared modes of transport such as walking, cycling, driving, taxis/ride-hailing, public transport, and emerging e-mobility devices. Yet significant barriers remain, including first- and last-mile gaps that limit access to public transport and designs of vehicles and infrastructure that do not accommodate age-related needs. This paper presents the objectives, networking approach, and early outcomes of the COST Action BOPALiM (2024–2028), an EU-funded pan-European network uniting expertise across health, engineering, economics, law, geography, and social sciences to advance inclusive community mobility. Through interprofessional working groups and living laboratories in urban and rural settings, BOPALiM is mapping user-centred needs, identifying scalable technical and policy solutions, and strengthening European research capacity. Early work points to design mismatches in local transport systems, promising co-creation strategies for mobility transitions after driving cessation, and new indicators linking mobility, participation, and well-being.

Aim: To compare student nurses' expectations and newly qualified nurses' experiences regarding clinical practice in Switzerland 1 year after graduation.Design: A secondary explorative analysis of a cross‐sectional survey.Methods: The data were sourced from the Swiss National Graduate Survey of Health Professionals covering six universities of applied sciences between 2016 and 2019, with information on three cohorts of bachelor student nurses, with a 1‐year follow‐up between each year. The participants were 533 bachelor‐prepared nursing graduates.Results: The student nurses' overall expectations included the following top two prioritized aspects: ‘contributing to something important’ and ‘adequate time to spend with patients’. Newly graduated nurses' clinical practice experiences demonstrated that not all expectations were met 1 year after graduation. The largest gaps were found in ‘adequate time to spend with patients’, ‘work–life balance’ and experiencing ‘good management’.Conclusion: The most crucial expectation gaps are related to having sufficient time to spend with patients and a good work–life balance. The most important result is whether there is a shortage of places for nurses to work rather than the oft‐cited shortage of nurses.Implications for the Profession and/or Patient Care: The expectations of Swiss newly qualified nurses can be better met by an assessment in the first year about which individual perceptions of workplace characteristics cause them to make choices to change something about their work, affect their job satisfaction or influence their intention to stay.Impact: Few of the student nurses' expectations were met 1 year after graduation, therefore Swiss healthcare institutions should improve needs assessments to strengthen the nurse workforce starting early in employment. The results underscore the importance of a constructive management culture, such as that in magnet hospitals in the United States which underpins the philosophy of changing in nursing. The results can be used internationally as a benchmark and as a basis for introducing potential interventions for nurse retention.Reporting Method: This study was reported following the Standardized Reporting of Secondary Data Analyses Checklist.Patient or Public Contribution: There were no patient or public contributions.Trial and Protocol Registration: This study has not been registered.

Health Impact Assessment (HIA), an inherently trans-disciplinary approach, is used to help evaluate and improve projects or programmes in sectors such as transportation, where new infrastructure is likely to have effects on health. This article describes the screening, scoping, appraisal, and recommendation steps of an HIA on a new 24 km highway around the conurbation of Strasbourg, France. Methods included a literature review and quantitative estimates of the health effects of air pollution and noise. Although planned, interviews and focus groups proved impossible due to political and administrative difficulties. In replacement, answers to a related public inquiry were submitted to a secondary, thematic analysis. The new infrastructure is likely to create or help maintain some jobs in the short term and might accelerate certain journeys, but it does not seem able to improve local mobility and air quality issues. It crystallises the dissatisfaction of a part of the local population and raises the question of the transparency of the design and validation processes of major infrastructure projects. Despite an unfavourable political context, the HIA approach described in this article was able to overcome methodological difficulties and obstacles thanks to creative research methods and trans-disciplinarity to finally yield relevant information and suggestions for urban health promotion.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused overwhelming changes in individual and community daily-life, resulting from the public health measures implemented to contain it, and also from its psychological and socio-economic consequences. These shifts and consequences impacted the entire population, but some groups are more likely to be affected by these changes, including higher education students.Objectives: a) to investigate mental health status and its determinants among higher-education students in Portugal and Switzerland; and b) to explore adjustment patterns used by these students to overcome the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods: A cross-sectional study with a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was conducted in two phases. First, an online survey was conducted among higher education students in Portugal and Switzerland, in Portuguese and French respectively. A convenience sampling method was used. Second, some participants from the first phase were invited to participate in four online focus group discussions (two in each country) using a maximum variation sampling method.Results: The survey was answered by 1,880 students. Portuguese students revealed higher levels of stress and anxiety, but lower depression symptoms and less resilient coping compared to Swiss respondents. Hope was identified as an explanatory variable for mental health symptoms in students from both countries. In the focus groups (n = 27), 13 adjustment strategies were found, which were subdivided into three spheres: personal, social, and contextual.Conclusions: The results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic had a mild to moderate impact on most of the evaluated mental health variables. Nevertheless, the students reacted and mobilized positive short-term strategies, which need to be reinforced in order to prevent long-term psychological harm. In addition, our results can inform psychosocial interventions to minimize psychological impact, anxiety, depression, and stress due to sanitary crises or other population-wide problems or disasters.

The 2015–2017 global migratory crisis saw unprecedented numbers of people on the move and tremendous diversity in terms of age, gender and medical requirements. This article focuses on key emerging public health issues around migrant populations and their interactions with host populations. Basic needs and rights of migrants and refugees are not always respected in regard to article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 23 of the Refugee Convention. These are populations with varying degrees of vulnerability and needs in terms of protection, security, rights, and access to healthcare. Their health status, initially conditioned by the situation at the point of origin, is often jeopardised by adverse conditions along migratory paths and in intermediate and final destination countries. Due to their condition, forcibly displaced migrants and refugees face a triple burden of non-communicable diseases, infectious diseases, and mental health issues. There are specific challenges regarding chronic infectious and neglected tropical diseases, for which awareness in host countries is imperative. Health risks in terms of susceptibility to, and dissemination of, infectious diseases are not unidirectional. The response, including the humanitarian effort, whose aim is to guarantee access to basic needs (food, water and sanitation, healthcare), is gripped with numerous challenges. Evaluation of current policy shows insufficiency regarding the provision of basic needs to migrant populations, even in the countries that do the most. Governments around the world need to rise to the occasion and adopt policies that guarantee universal health coverage, for migrants and refugees, as well as host populations, in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An expert consultation was carried out in the form of a pre-conference workshop during the 4th International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control (ICPIC) in Geneva, Switzerland, on 20 June 2017, the United Nations World Refugee Day.

The aim of this study is to investigate the integration of the health dimension within existing impact assessments such as environmental impact assessment (EIA), strategic environmental assessment (SEA) and sustainability assessment (SA). This work focuses on the canton of Geneva (Switzerland) and was carried out using the following methodology: a review of the legal texts and the guidelines that underpin the design and methodology of IAs; an analysis of the application of these tools in 37 case studies (11 SEAs and 20 EIAs conducted in Geneva as well as 6 SAs undertaken at national level); and conducting semi-structured interviews with selected professionals who participated in these case studies. Our study reveals serious shortcomings in the consideration of health within the investigated environmental assessments, limited to a simple review of the effects of projects on the determinants of the physical environment as required by the Swiss or local (Geneva) legislations. Regarding SA, our research finds that health is treated superficially and primarily through the analysis of ‘health and safety’ criteria.