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Young adults entering the workforce are at increased risk of becoming overweight or obese. Yet, internationally, young adults are rarely targeted in health campaigns, and little is known on how to improve their interest and participation in health promotion efforts. Through 33 semi-structured interviews with young adults working in Singapore, we explored their engagement with existing public and workplace health promotion efforts that encouraged healthy eating and increased physical activity, and their subjective health in the context of their daily lives. Interviews were coded and thematically analysed, taking an inductive and deductive approach. Despite some interest in health messaging, participating working young adults rarely adopted health-promoting activities such as meeting daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly. Participants reported that the health promotion campaigns they were aware of, suggested actions that they couldn't incorporate in their lives as they did not address the barriers that they are facing from socio-environmental contributors such as long working hours, personal and social commitments, and the food environment. Furthermore, some considered their health to be good enough and therefore had little reason to change existing practices. Affordable and accessible health screenings were an objective way for young adults to re-evaluate their perceptions of their own health which motivated some to favourably change their behaviours. Our findings suggest that future health promotion campaigns would benefit from more fully addressing some of the existing barriers that young working adults face, in tandem with policy changes to directly tackle the socio-environmental conditions for young workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With their increasing popularity, there is a need for more research clarifying the potential strengths and weaknesses of the comic format for education. The panelled comic format may be particularly effective for educating adults on the scientific aspects of processes (sequences of events, occurring over time, in a series of discrete steps). We tested change in performance in adults (n = 879) in correctly ordering the stages in four processes before and after being exposed to educational material about these processes. The material was presented in a random selection of one of seven experimentally manipulated formats based on characteristics of comic books. Overall, participant performance improved after seeing the educational material. There were significant differences in learning between the processes, suggesting that the benefits, or detriments, of the comic format may be subject-specific. Performance was significantly better when images were subdivided into panels, and worse when an explanatory agent (character) was included, though these differences in performance did not survive adjustment for multiple comparisons. This study presents some evidence that the panelled nature of the comic format supports learning about scientific processes in adults. Given results differed notably between the specific topics to be learned, there is substantial scope for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible work provisions are justified as enabling workers to manage their personal lives, including their health, around work. This study deploys social theories of practice to investigate how the temporal characteristics of flexible work can produce, alter and disrupt the health improvement efforts of workers, concentrating on healthy eating and keeping physically active. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 Australian workers, the study explores the temporal mechanisms linking flexible work to health practices, focusing on routines, rhythms and rituals (the three Rs). This research finds that work-time arrangements can provide the temporal scaffolding necessary for health practices (through routines, rhythms and rituals), but only when there is day-to-day, mid-term, and long-term work predictability. Australia's flexible work policies do not provide this requisite temporal predictability. Health promoting employment provisions would have to reinstate employment standards from the 1970s, providing the desired predictability for flexible provisions to benefit workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing countries' access to data can improve immunisation coverage through evidence-based decision-making. However, data collection and reporting is resource-intensive, so needs to be pragmatic, especially in low-and-middle-income countries. We aimed to identify which indicators are most important for measuring, and improving, national immunisation performance in Pacific Island Countries (PICs). We conducted an expert elicitation study, asking 13 experts involved in delivering immunisation programs, decision-makers, health information specialists, and global development partners across PICs to rate 41 indicators based on their knowledge of the feasibility and relevance of each indicator. We also asked experts their preferences for indicators to be retained or removed from a list of indicators for PICs. Experts participated in two rating rounds, with a discussion on the reasons for ratings before the second round. We calculated mean scores for feasibility and relevance, and ranked indicators based on experts' preferences and mean scores. We used framework analysis to identify reasons for selecting indicators. Experts agreed that certain indicators were essential to measure (e.g. data use in program planning and measles vaccination coverage), but preferences varied for most indicators. Preferences to include indicators in a set of indicators for PICs moderately correlated with scores for relevance (r = 0.68) and feasibility (r = 0.56). In discussions, experts highlighted usefulness for decision-making and ease of data collection, reporting and interpretation as the main reasons driving indicator selection. Country-specific factors such as health system factors, roles and influence of various immunisation actors, and macro-level factors (namely population size, distribution and mobility) affected relevance and feasibility, leading us to conclude that a single set of indicators for all PICs is inappropriate. Rather than having a strict set of indicators that all countries must measure and report against, performance indicators should be flexible, country-specific, and selected in consultation with immunisation actors who collect and use the data., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Patel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)