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The purpose of this paper is to investigate and quantify the impact of delivery restrictions on costs and environmental performance for a distribution operation.

Data were gathered from a company and several scenarios with varying delivery restrictions were investigated.

The results show significant reductions in cost and environmental impacts are achieved when restrictions are relaxed. However, the research also highlighted the importance of adopting a supply chain (SC) approach to the removal of restrictions and the need for public/private sector cooperation.

The case study is based on one company only. However, the company performs many trips each day to many different customers.

The paper provides insight into the scope for change in the SC decision‐making processes in order to reduce environmental impacts (and identifies limitations).

The paper is a contribution to better understanding the importance of logistics decisions and not only transport when considering urban freight problems.

Older people living in nursing homes have complex care needs and frequently need specialists’ advice and support that can be challenging to deliver in a rural setting. The aim of this paper is to describe a model of integrated care in a rural area supported by a nurse case manager.

A real-world evidence study of people living in Ribes de Freser nursing home, was conducted between specific timeframes in 2019 and 2022, comparing the casemix and outcomes of a traditional care model with the integrated interdisciplinary model.

The integrated care model led to a significant reduction in transfers to the emergency department, hospitalisations, outpatient medical visits and a reduction in the number of medicines. In addition, the number of residents receiving end-of-life care at the nursing home showed a substantial increase.

This case study contributes valuable evidence supporting the implementation of an integrated model of nurse case manager support in nursing homes, particularly in the rural contexts, where access to specialist medical staff may be limited. The findings highlight the potential benefits of person-centred integrated care for older adults, addressing their complex needs and improving end-of-life care in nursing home settings.

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the continued resistance and challenges faced by drug checking services (DCS) and review how the existing literature and the contributions to the special issue address them, with a view to making recommendations.

The existing literature and the contributions to the special issue are reviewed.

Drug checking cannot be equated with quality control. With the appropriate equipment and chemistry staff, DCS can provide quantitative analysis and reliable results. When the product does not match expectations, service users discard the tested substance of concern. To more easily compare the results of different studies and better evaluate drug checking, standardisation of measures is desirable. Uptake of drug checking, notably in festivals, is low and depends in part on the capacity of DCS. Drug checking has added value in monitoring drug markets and is complementary with chemical (forensic) analysis.

This paper interrogates in a relatively comprehensive way the continued resistance to drug checking in light of theoretical and empirical research to derive recommendations that are specific to drug checking and that are addressed to health professionals, researchers and also to policymakers.

There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test three hypotheses consistent with a negative correlation between income inequality and population health: the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm that absolute income positively affects health. For the RIH we find sensitivity to the reference group used. Most interestingly, we find higher income inequality to robustly associate with better child health. The same pattern appears in a cross country regression. To explain the conflicting results in the literature we suggest examining potential mediators such as generosity, food sharing, trust and purchasing power.