Being able to identify socially frail older adults is essential for designing interventions and policy and for the prediction of health outcomes, both on the level of individual older adults and of the population. The aim of the present study was to adapt the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to the Dutch language and culture for those purposes. A systematic cross-cultural adaptation of the initial Social Vulnerability Index was performed following five steps: initial translation, synthesis of translations, back translation, a Delphi procedure, and a test for face validity and feasibility. The main result of this study is a face-valid 32 item Dutch version of the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI-D) that is feasible in health care and social care settings. The SVI-D is a useful index to measure social frailty in Dutch-language countries and offers a broad, holistic quantification of older people's social circumstances related to the risk of adverse health outcomes.
DOCUMENT
A comprehensive vulnerability assessment is a scientific basis for the realization of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. Energy resilience plays a crucial role in mitigating social vulnerability due to disaster shocks. Often, energy infrastructure and services collapse after disasters. The recent Russia-Ukraine war has exacerbated Europe's energy crisis and social vulnerabilities, making it even more urgent to add energy resilience to vulnerability assessments. This paper takes the Netherlands as the study area for vulnerability assessment, constructs a new social vulnerability indicator (SVI) system supplemented with the energy element, and compares that with the traditional energy indicator system. The results indicate that: 1) The introduction of energy indicators fills the gap of traditional SVI assessment. 2) Energy indicators reveal regional and spatial differences in potential social vulnerability in the Netherlands. 3) Energy-inclusive SVI demonstrates that uneven urbanization exacerbates risks and inequalities for vulnerable groups, with potential impacts on social vulnerability. Sustainable urban development requires the search for a recognized and coordinated approach to managing vulnerability across regions. The complementarity of energy indicators offers opportunities to provide a more comprehensive assessment of spatial patterns of social vulnerability, identify potentially vulnerable areas, enhance urban disaster resilience, and achieve sustainable urban development.
LINK
The phenomena of urbanization and climate change interact with the growing number of older people living in cities. One of the effects of climate change is an increased riverine flooding hazard, and when floods occur this has a severe impact on human lives and comes with vast economic losses. Flood resilience management procedures should be supported by a combination of complex social and environmental vulnerability assessments. Therefore, new methodologies and tools should be developed for this purpose. One way to achieve such inclusive procedures is by incorporating a social vulnerability evaluation methodology for environmental and flood resilience assessment. These are illustrated for application in the Polish city of Wrocław. Socio-environmental vulnerability mapping, based on spatial analyses using the poverty risk index, data on the ageing population, as well as the distribution of the areas vulnerable to floods, was conducted with use of a location intelligence system combining Geographic Information System (GIS) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools. The new methodology allows for the identification of areas populated by social groups that are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of flooding. C 2018 SETAC Original Publication: Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:592–597. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ieam.4077
MULTIFILE
The COVID19 pandemic highlighted the vulnerability in supply chain networks in the healthcare sector and the tremendous waste problem of disposable healthcare products, such as isolation gowns. Single-use disposable isolation gowns cause great ecological impact. Reusable gowns can potentially reduce climate impacts and improve the resilience of healthcare systems by ensuring a steady supply in times of high demand. However, scaling reusable, circular isolation gowns in healthcare organizations is not straightforward. It is impeded by economic barriers – such as servicing costs for each use – and logistic and hygiene barriers, as processes for transport, storage and safety need to be (re)designed. Healthcare professionals (e.g. purchasing managers) lack complete information about social, economic and ecological costs, the true cost of products, to make informed circular purchasing decisions. Additionally, the residual value of materials recovered from circular products is overlooked and should be factored into purchasing decisions. To facilitate the transition to circular procurement in healthcare, purchasing managers need more fine-grained, dynamic information on true costs. Our RAAK Publiek proposal (MODLI) addresses a problem that purchasing managers face – making purchasing decisions that factor in social, economic and ecological costs and future benefits from recovered materials. Building on an existing consortium that developed a reusable and recyclable isolation gown, we design and develop an open-source decision-support tool to inform circular procurement in healthcare organizations and simulate various purchasing options of non-circular and circular products, including products from circular cascades. Circular procurement is considered a key driver in the transition to a circular economy as it contributes to closing energy and material loops and minimizes negative impacts and waste throughout entire product lifecycles. MODLI aims to support circular procurement policies in healthcare organizations by providing dynamic information for circular procurement decision making.
Cities: Action-perspectives for a climate-proof, drought-resilient, and water-sensitive built environment Recurring droughts severely impacted the Dutch built Environment , causing financial, environmental, and social effects. Climate change and urban developments are expected to aggravate this. Although municipalities recognize drought as critical risk, few have prepared for it. This is due to a lack of understanding of the urban water balance under drought and the vulnerability of urban water use(r)s, ambiguity in role and responsibility, and missing action-perspectives. Thirsty Cities aims to address this by developing, collecting, connecting and delivering in a transdisciplinary approach the needed knowledge, insights, tooling, principles, designs, infrastructures and action-perspectives for a climate-proof, drought-resilient, and water-sensitive built environment.Dorstige Steden: Handelingsperspectieven voor een klimaatbestendige, droogteweerbare, en waterrobuuste bebouwde omgeving.De Nederlandse bebouwde omgeving is herhaaldelijk geraakt door droogte, met financiële, ecologische en maatschappelijke effecten. Klimaatverandering en stedelijke ontwikkelingen zullen het droogte-risico naar verwachting doen toenemen. Alhoewel overheden droogte als een risico erkennen, hebben weinigen zich daarop voorbereid. Gebrek aan inzicht in de stedelijke waterbalans onder droogte, de kwetsbaarheid van stedelijke watergebruikers, onduidelijkheid in rol en verantwoordelijkheid van betrokken actoren, en ontbrekende handelingsperspectieven liggen hieraan ten grondslag. ‘Dorstige Steden’ draagt middels trans-disciplinair onderzoek bij aan een klimaatbestendige, droogteweerbare, en waterrobuuste bebouwde omgeving door de benodigde kennis, inzichten, instrumentaria, principes en ontwerpen te ontwikkelen, verzamelen en verbinden en handelingsperspectieven te formuleren.
Vulnerable pregnant women are an important and complex theme in daily practice of birth care professionals. Vulnerability is an important risk factor for maternal and perinatal mortality and morbidity. Providing care for these women is often complex. First, because it is not always easy to identify vulnerability. Secondly, vulnerable women more often cancel their appointments with midwives and finally, many professionals are involved while they do not always know each other. Even though professionals are aware of the risks of vulnerability for future mothers and their (unborn) children and the complexity of care for these women, there is no international definition for ‘vulnerable pregnancies’. Therefore, we start this project with defining a mutual definition of vulnerability during pregnancy. In current projects of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (RUAS) we define a vulnerable pregnant woman as: a pregnant woman facing psychopathology, psychosocial problems, and/or substance abuse combined with lack of individual and/or social resources (low socioeconomic status, low educational level, limited social network). In the Netherlands, care for vulnerable pregnant women is fragmented and therefore it is unclear for birth care professionals which interventions are available and effective. Therefore, Dutch midwives are convinced that exchanging knowledge and best practices concerning vulnerable pregnancies between midwifery practices throughout Europe could enhance their knowledge and provide midwives (SMB partners in this project) with tools to improve care for vulnerable pregnant women. The aim of this project is to exchange knowledge and best practices concerning vulnerable pregnancies between midwifery practices in several European countries, in order to improve knowledge and skills of midwives. As a result, guidelines will be developed in order to exchange selected best practices which enable midwives to implement this knowledge in their own context. This contributes to improving care for vulnerable pregnant women throughout Europe.
