Residential built environment and working from home: A New Zealand perspective during COVID-19.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 90 countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, executed lockdowns. As non-essential businesses could not operate from their usual centralised locations, some responded by implementing working from home (WFH). This caused a temporary shift in how people interacted with the built environment and provided a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between WFH and New Zealand's built environment. A nationwide survey was conducted online using Google Forms to explore the experiences of New Zealanders while WFH during the 2020 nationwide lockdown. Questions focused on workplace and WFH conditions, and built environment features and characteristics before, during, and after the lockdown. The quality of residential housing and its impact on respondents' ability to effectively WFH was of particular interest. In total, 794 survey respondents experienced WFH. Respondents generally had a positive experience while WFH, with 82.6 % of respondents that experienced WFH wanting to shift to part- or full-time WFH. While the context of the COVID-19 lockdown is unique, the results have potential applications for future policies that can increase the quality of the residential built environment to benefit the well-being of its users.

Applying the Haddon Matrix to Hospital Earthquake Preparedness and Response.

Since its 1960s origins, the Haddon matrix has served as a tool to understand and prevent diverse mechanisms of injuries and promote safety. Potential remains for broadened application and innovation of the matrix for disaster preparedness. Hospital functionality and efficiency are particularly important components of community vulnerability in developed and developing nations alike. Given the Haddon matrix's user-friendly approach to integrating current engineering concepts, behavioral sciences, and policy dimensions, we seek to apply it in the context of hospital earthquake preparedness and response. The matrix's framework lends itself to interdisciplinary planning and collaboration between social and physical sciences, paving the way for a systems-oriented reduction in vulnerabilities. Here, using an associative approach to integrate seemingly disparate social and physical science disciplines yields innovative insights about hospital disaster preparedness for earthquakes. We illustrate detailed examples of pre-event, event, and post-event engineering, behavioral science, and policy factors that hospital planners should evaluate given the complex nature, rapid onset, and broad variation in impact and outcomes of earthquakes. This novel contextual examination of the Haddon matrix can enhance critical infrastructure disaster preparedness across the epidemiologic triad, by integrating essential principles of behavioral sciences, policy, law, and engineering to earthquake preparedness.