Digital Health and Health Systems of the Future.

Digital strategies have been formally recognized as a critical health systems strengthening strategy to help meet the Sustainable Development Goals and universal health coverage targets. This landscaping collection reviews multiple possible approaches across health system pillars, from digital referrals to decision support systems, identifying key knowledge gaps across these domains and recognizing the growth needed in the field to realize its full potential.

Increasing skilled birth attendance through midwifery workforce management.

Policy makers and development partners struggle to help find solutions to the high rates of maternal and newborn mortality in many low and middle income countries. Increasing access to midwives and health workers skilled in midwifery can help to alleviate the situation. We aim to contribute to the debate on strategies to increase access to skilled birth attendance by sharing our views, illustrated with as yet unpublished case stories that were recognized with Awards of Excellence at the Second Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, 2011, held in Bangkok, Thailand.

Global Health Workforce Alliance: increasing the momentum for health workforce development.

The Global Health Workforce Alliance was launched in 2006 to provide a joint platform for governments, development partners, international agencies, civil society organizations, academia, private sector, professional associations, and other stakeholders to work together to address a global crisis in human resources for health. Five years later the vision and mandate of the Alliance still remain valid. Despite advances in bringing the health workforce to the fore in international health policy arenas, more available knowledge and tools, and encouraging signs of commitments from many countries, health workforce bottlenecks continue to prevent many health systems from delivering essential and quality health services.

A 21st century approach to assessing the protection of workers' health.

Objective: This article presents a rights-based approach to the way occupational health and safety is understood, departing from medical, engineering, and technocratic approaches that dominated the field throughout the 20th century. Moving toward a 21st century concept of the good society - based on citizenship rights and principles of universalism - a social protection-based system of assessing governments' performance in protecting workers' health and well-being is proffered.

Methods: A Work Security Index (WSI) is used as a benchmarking system for evaluating national or local level governments' performance in this domain.

Stiff reminders, and regenerating for the future: a commentary on "Man as the measure of all things".

Margrit Hugentobler's article, "Man as the Measure of All Things: A Limiting Approach to Urban Regeneration?," took to task the challenges of sustainable development that neither governments nor industry have yet met on the scale that is needed. From a planner's perspective, she gives a philosophical context. In essence, her message is that through thoughtful regeneration, urban environments can become more sustainable and that urban regeneration can meet a variety of human and environmental needs.

Chinese workers never die: immortality or elusive statistics?

Have Chinese workers discovered immortality? No, but it appears that some of their employers may have--at least on paper.

Working at the check-in: consequences for health.

No body of literature exists related specifically to the occupational health of airport check-in workers. The problems encountered by airport check-in workers are typical of other service-sector occupations with similar work-related health hazards, particularly those characterized by a high level of demand with low worker control, performed predominantly by women. The knowledge gap could be narrowed by broadening the scope in both traditional occupational health and ergonomics studies to take into equal consideration jobs performed by women.

Technical assistance to the grassroots, part ii: erin brockovich revisited--a lesson for social policy-making and agency.

Reading "Technical assistance: Providing grassroots groups access to scientific and technical information" by Barbara Berney (New Solutions, Vol. 15, No. 1), I was overtaken by a subliminal image of Erin Brockovich (looking like Julia Roberts), who was a self-taught technical assistance provider (TA).

Work security in a global economy.

Work security is a fundamental right of all working people. After World War II, the welfare state became an intrinsic part of the "Golden Age" of capitalism, in which universal prosperity seemed attainable. Workers' organizations frequently played a crucial role in policy decisions that promoted full employment, income stability, and equitable treatment of workers.