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The purpose of this paper is to examine the career shocks of Red Cross (RC) of Serbia staff and volunteers providing aid during the 2016 migrants’ influx. Specifically, the authors explore what the volatile environment in which RC staff and volunteers work can teach us about career shocks, and what makes a career shock for people whose everyday work entails stressful events.

This study examined a number of anecdotes that reflect the career shock construct to a greater or lesser extent. These anecdotes were developed by RC staff and volunteers as part of a communications training storytelling exercise.

The authors analyzed these events from the perspective of recent developments in career shocks research and examined whether the anecdotes contained elements that would enable us to differentiate between career shocks and stressors. Those anecdotes found to be the most prototypical of career shocks, as opposed to stressors, were found to instigate in-depth reflection about the career, were identity related, and had a tangible career impact. Shocking events in the eyes of RC people entailed work demands that go beyond expectations, excessive media scrutiny, and conflicting values. The authors discuss how organizational values, fostering person–organization fit, providing organizational and collegial support, and deploying “weathered” staff, could comprise the “vaccine” that makes the organization immune to career shocks.

By taking a data before theory approach to the study of career shocks, this paper provides a novel perspective on the lived experiences of RC people, and how such experiences may be classified into career shocks or stressors.

This paper aims to address a gap in investigating specific impacts of climate change on mental health in the Pacific region, a region prone to extreme events. This paper reports on a study on the connections between climate change, public health, extreme weather and climate events (EWEs), livelihoods and mental health, focusing on the Pacific region Islands countries.

This paper deploys two main methods. The first is a bibliometric analysis to understand the state of the literature. For example, the input data for term co-occurrence analysis using VOSviewer is bibliometric data of publications downloaded from Scopus. The second method describes case studies, which outline some of the EWEs the region has faced, which have also impacted mental health.

The results suggest that the increased frequency of EWEs in the region contributes to a greater incidence of mental health problems. These, in turn, are associated with a relatively low level of resilience and greater vulnerability. The findings illustrate the need for improvements in the public health systems of Pacific nations so that they are in a better position to cope with the pressures posed by a changing environment.

This paper contributes to the current literature by identifying the links between climate change, extreme events, environmental health and mental health consequences in the Pacific Region. It calls for greater awareness of the subject matter of mental health among public health professionals so that they may be better able to recognise the symptoms and relate them to their climate-related causes and co-determinant factors.

Background: This paper examines the impact of coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak on employees’ mental health, specifically psychological distress and depression. It aims at identifying the main stressors during and post COVID-19, examining the main moderating factors which may mitigate or aggravate the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ mental health and finally to suggest recommendations from a human resource management perspective to mitigate COVID-19’s impact on employees’ mental health.

Methods: This paper is a literature review. The search for articles was made in Google scholar, Web of Science and Semantic scholar. We used a combination of terms related to coronavirus OR COVID-19, workplace and mental health. Due to the paucity of studies on the COVID-19 impact on employees’ mental health, we had to draw on studies on recent epidemics.

Results: The identified literature reports a negative impact of COVID-19 on individual’s mental health. Stressors include perception of safety, threat and risk of contagion, infobesity versus the unknown, quarantine and confinement, stigma and social exclusion as well as financial loss and job insecurity. Furthermore, three dimensions of moderating factors have been identified: organizational, institutional and individual factors. In addition, a list of recommendations has been presented to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the employee’s mental health, during and after the outbreak, from a human resource management perspective.

Conclusions: Coronavirus is new and is in a rapid progress while writing this paper. Most of current research are biomedical focusing on individuals’ physical health. In this context, mental health issues seem overlooked. This paper helps to broaden the scope of research on workplace mental health, by examining the impact of a complex new pandemic: COVID-19 on employees’ mental health, from social sciences perceptive, mobilizing psychology and human resource management.

This study aims to explore public coping strategies with government-imposed lockdown restrictions (i.e. forced compliance) due to a health crisis (i.e. COVID-19). This directly impacts the public's power, as they may feel alienated from their environment and from others. Consequently, this study explores the relationships between the public's power, quality of life and crisis-coping strategies. This is important to help governments understand public discourse surrounding perceived government health crisis communication, which aids effective policy development.

An online questionnaire distributed via Qualtrics received 371 responses from the South African public and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate the public's experience of powerlessness and resulting information-sharing, negative word-of-mouth and support-seeking as crisis coping strategies in response to government-imposed lockdown restrictions.

The public's perspective on health crisis communication used in this study sheds light on adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies that the public employs due to the alienation they feel during a health crisis with government-forced compliance. The findings add to the sparse research on crisis communication from the public perspective in a developing country context and provide insights for governments in developing health crisis communication strategies. The results give insight into developing policies related to community engagement and citizen participation during a pandemic.

Debates on the ethics of disaster and humanitarian studies concern unequal relations in research (among research institutes/researchers/stakeholders); the physical and psychological well-being of research participants and researchers; and the imposition of western methods, frameworks and epistemologies to the study of disasters. This paper focuses on everyday ethics: how they need to be translated throughout the everyday practices of research and how researchers can deal with the ethical dilemmas that inevitably occur.

This paper analyses the process of addressing ethics-related dilemmas from the first author's experiences researching disaster governance in high-intensity conflict settings, in particular drawing from 4 to 6 months of fieldwork in South Sudan and Afghanistan. In addition, ethical issues around remote research are discussed, drawing on the example of research conducted in Yemen. It is based on the personal notes taken by the first author and on the experience of both authors translating guidelines for research in remote and hazardous areas into research practices.

The paper concerns translating ethics into the everyday practices of research planning, implementation and communication. It argues for the importance of adaptive research processes with space for continuous reflection in order to advance disaster studies based on (1) equitable collaboration; (2) participatory methodologies wherever possible; (3) safety and security for all involved; (4) ethical approaches of remote research and (5) responsible and inclusive research communication and research-uptake. Openness about gaps and limitations of ethical standards, discussions with peers about dilemmas and reporting on these in research outcomes should be embedded in everyday ethics.

The paper contributes to discussions on everyday ethics, where ethics are integral to the epistemologies and everyday practices of research.