Advancing child health and educational equity during the COVID-19 pandemic through science and advocacy

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the changing role of scientists, clinicians, ethicists, and educators in advocacy as they rapidly translate their findings to inform practice and policy. Critical efforts have been directed towards understanding child well-being, especially with pandemic-related educational disruptions. While school closures were part of early widespread public health measures to curb the spread of COVID-19, they have not been without consequences for all children, and especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In a recent Isr J Health Policy Res perspective, Paltiel and colleagues demonstrate the integral role of academic activism to promote child well-being during the pandemic by highlighting work of the multidisciplinary academic group on children and coronavirus (MACC). In this commentary, we explore parallels to MACC’s work in an international context by describing the efforts of a multidisciplinary team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, to aggregate data, conduct analyses, and offer training tools intended to minimize health and educational inequities for children throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As both MACC and our work collectively demonstrates, multidisciplinary partnerships and public-facing data-driven initiatives are crucial to advocating for children's equitable access to quality health and education. This will likely not be the last pandemic that children experience in their lifetime. As such, efforts should be made to apply the lessons learned during the current pandemic to strengthen multidisciplinary academic-public partnerships which will continue to play a critical role in the future.

Reflections of Technology Narratives

This narrative explores the changing role of technology during the pandemic while simultaneously offering strategies for managing stress caused by the overuse of technology. Technology brings people together who cannot see each other in person, such as families who live in different locations and students who attend online classes. Technology serves the dual role of keeping people connected, especially during events such as a pandemic, and making people feel disconnected due to distraction caused by devices.

The Changing Role of Maintenance in Physical Asset Management

Physical asset management (PAM) is an area with a growing role in the asset intensive industry. The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the role of maintenance within PAM. For this purpose, a case study was conducted in a Slovenian organization. The results show that maintenance is recognized as part of PAM activities in the observed paper mill company. Furthermore, the results of the study show that the strongest involvement of maintenance in PAM-related tasks was found in the creation and maintenance of the maintenance management system and the least in the definition of key success factors for the asset system and the design of the asset system. In addition, the case study uncovered two main factors that have the greatest impact on the involvement of maintenance and its activities within PAM, namely leadership and knowledge management. This study is one of the few studies that aims to explore the role of maintenance within PAM, considering all life cycle phases of the asset system.