Resilient Services Research Articles

Exploring organizational resilience as a quality indicator in social services: A cross-sectional study

Social Services are vital for addressing adversity and safeguarding vulnerable individuals, presenting professionals with complex challenges that demand resilience, recovery, and continual learning. This study investigates Organizational Resilience within Community Social Services, focusing on strategic planning, adaptive capacity, and user perspectives. A cross-sectional study involved 534 professionals and service users from Community Social Services Centers in Spain. Centers were selected based on the characteristics of their population and the representativeness of their geographic location. The study utilized the Benchmark Resilience Tool (BRT) to evaluate Organizational Resilience and the SERVPERF questionnaire to gauge user-perceived service quality. The results demonstrate satisfactory levels of Organizational Resilience and user satisfaction, while also highlighting key areas for enhancing resilient strategies: reinforcement of personnel for thinking outside the box or in the resources available to the organization to face unexpected changes. These findings suggest the need to develop and optimize measures that improve the organization’s ability to adapt to and recover from adverse situations, ensuring a positive user experience. Emphasizing the importance of resilience in Social Services as a quality predictor, future research should explore innovative strategies to bolster Organizational Resilience. The findings emphasize the need to strengthen resilience in Social Services, enhancing practice, policy, and adaptability to support vulnerable populations.

Impacts of COVID‐19 pandemic on short‐term outcomes of low anterior resection performed in hospitals with different surgical volumes

AbstractAimTo evaluate the impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic on short‐term outcomes of low anterior resection (LAR) across hospitals classified by surgical volume.MethodsData of patients who underwent elective LAR for rectal cancer between 2018 and 2022 were obtained from the National Clinical Database of Japan. Hospitals were categorized into high‐, medium‐, and low‐volume groups. Each group was constituted to represent approximately one‐third of all surgeries performed between 2018 and 2019. The standardized morbidity/mortality ratios (SMRs) of Clavien–Dindo grade ≥3 (CD ≥ 3) complications were the primary endpoint. The secondary endpoints included anastomotic leakage, pneumonia, and surgical mortality.ResultsThis study analyzed 91 800 cases of elective LAR, with 10.5% experiencing CD ≥ 3 complications, 8.8% anastomotic leakage, 0.9% pneumonia, and 0.5% surgical mortality. Despite COVID‐19, SMRs of CD ≥ 3 complications decreased from 2018 to 2022 across all groups. However, increases in the rates and SMRs of CD ≥ 3 complications were observed in low‐volume hospitals around mid‐2020, followed by a decline. Anastomotic leakage showed similar trends. The rates and SMRs of pneumonia and surgical mortality remained unchanged. Notably, anastomotic leakage rates were 7.6%, 8.9%, and 10.0% in high‐, medium‐, and low‐volume hospitals, respectively, indicating superior outcomes in high‐volume hospitals.ConclusionEarly COVID‐19 waves may have disproportionately affected low‐volume hospitals. However, the decline in SMRs of CD ≥ 3 complications from 2018 to 2022 across all three groups suggests the robustness and resilience of surgical services for rectal cancer in Japan. The potential disparity in short‐term outcomes among hospitals is a new concern.

Review of policies for building climate resilience in urban sanitation systems and services in Nepal

ABSTRACT Building resilience of sanitation systems and services to changing climate is necessary to ensuring continuity of essential sanitation services in the face of hazardous events. An approach towards this solution is to create a robust enabling environment through policies for planning and implementing adaptation measures. The objective of this study is to review the climate change and water and sanitation policies in Nepal to assess the adequacy of the documents in addressing climate resilience in sanitation systems and services, with focus on urban on-site sanitation. This paper is based on desk review of existing policy and plan documents related to climate change and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Nepal. The review has revealed that sanitation and climate change are addressed only to a limited extent, while focus on urban on-site sanitation is inadequate. These documents are therefore insufficient to provide guidance to build resilience in urban on-site sanitation systems and services. The paper concludes that sanitation-specific policies and programmes can tackle the sanitation challenges more effectively and address climate-related vulnerabilities in urban on-site sanitation systems and services. Enhanced collaboration among different stakeholders can create an environment conducive for policy changes and investments.

Enhancing the resilience of cancer services in terms of hospital built environment reconfiguration in case of pandemics

Enhancing the resilience of cancer services in terms of hospital built environment reconfiguration in case of pandemics

Developing an Emergency Medical Services Resilience Assessment Tool in Climate Change: A Study Protocol

Abstract Background: Climate change poses significant threats to the health and safety of communities worldwide. Extreme weather events can disrupt critical infrastructure and overwhelm emergency medical services (EMS) systems. As the frequency and intensity of these climate-related disasters continue to increase, it is essential that EMS organizations develop robust strategies to enhance their resilience. One important step in building climate-resilient EMS systems is the development of comprehensive assessment tools. Developing a comprehensive tool for assessing the resilience of EMS in the face of climate change. Methods: This research employs an applied, mixed-methods approach to investigate the development and validation of the Emergency Medical Services Resilience Assessment (EMSRA) tool. The study will be executed across four key phases: (a) A scoping review will be conducted to identify the global dimensions and components of EMS systems that demonstrate resilience to the impacts of climate change. (b) A qualitative study, involving semistructured interviews, will be undertaken to explore the specific dimensions and components of EMS resilience within the Iranian context. (c) Based on the findings from the scoping review and qualitative inquiry, assessment items related to EMS resilience in climate change will be extracted and synthesized to develop a pilot version of the EMSRA tool. (d) The pilot EMSRA tool will undergo a rigorous process of quantitative and qualitative validation, including an evaluation of its psychometric properties, to assess the resilience of EMS systems in the face of climate-related challenges. Conclusions: The development of EMSRA tool will enable the assessment and enhancement of climate change resilience within the national and provincial EMS systems, providing critical data to inform evidence-based strategies and plans for strengthening EMS against the impacts of severe climate changes.

Dynamic quantitative assessment of service resilience for long-distance energy pipelines under corrosion

Dynamic quantitative assessment of service resilience for long-distance energy pipelines under corrosion

Advancing Cybersecurity Governance: Adaptive Resilience and Strategic Third-Party Risk Management in Financial Services

As cyberattacks increase, banks and financial firms face new challenges. This research aims to improve cybersecurity by integrating adaptive resilience and strategic third-party risk management into current systems. This study uses thorough qualitative research methods to assess existing frameworks, identifying shortcomings that put companies at more risk. Findings reveal that firms using adaptive resilience - where governance policies adjust with real-time threat information and post-incident evaluation after incidents are much better at preventing and addressing cyber attacks. This paper stresses the importance of including third-party risk management in a comprehensive governance framework, as weaknesses in these relationships often lead to breaches. This study contributes critical insights and a strategic framework for financial institutions to bolster their defenses against sophisticated cyber threats, ensuring sustained resilience and security.

Cloud‐Edge Collaboration‐Based Multi‐Cluster System for Space‐Ground Integrated Network

ABSTRACTAs global informationization deepens, the importance of Space‐Ground Integrated Network (SGIN) as a new network architecture becomes increasingly prominent. SGIN combines the advantages of ground and space networks, enabling global information interconnection and sharing through various communication means such as satellites, drones, and ground stations. However, due to its complex network environment and diverse communication requirements, traditional network architectures struggle to meet its demands for efficiency, stability, and scalability. To address these challenges, we focus on the research, design, and implementation of a cloud‐edge collaboration‐based multi‐cluster system for SGIN. The goal is to construct an efficient, stable, and scalable network system capable of providing seamless global coverage and efficient communication within SGIN. We design a multi‐cluster system architecture based on container technology, leveraging cloud and edge computing techniques for dynamic resource allocation and efficient utilization. This architecture aims to meet the diverse network service requirements of ground terminals, enhancing responsiveness, efficiency, resilience, and reliability of network services. Additionally, we introduce a multipath data transmission mechanism to support the transfer of large‐scale data, such as remote sensing images. A simulation platform tailored for SGIN is developed, demonstrating the feasibility of the multi‐cluster system and the effectiveness of multipath data transmission.

Resolving the unintended consequences of collective co-production through group co-production: a case study in Shanghai

Co-production is an important approach to enhance service resilience in disaster response. However, most existing studies did not differentiate various types of co-production (i.e., collective vs. group co-production) and consider the potential tension between them. Based on evidence from self-organized groups for people with disabilities in Shanghai, this study found that as a type of collective co-production, compulsory epidemic prevention measures during the Covid-19 pandemic produced unintended consequences for people with disabilities: both government-organized and independent NGOs were forced to close offices, causing formal social services to be discontinued. However, as a type of group co-production, self-organized groups played an indispensable role in helping restore service resilience by providing material and consultation services to people with disabilities through online and offline approaches. This study not only contributes to the co-production literature through unveiling the tension and discussing the relation between collective and group co-production, but also provides valuable guidance for the government on how to promote self-organized groups to improve emergency management capacity.

PROGRESS: the sectoral approach to cyber resilience

Each critical infrastructure and vital service represents a unique instance of a complex socio-technical–economic system. Resilience in complex systems is an emergent behaviour that occurs from interactions between components and is not easily predictable from understanding each component in isolation. Yet, cybersecurity practice and maturity models still focus on the robustness of separate components: organizational units, firms, or IT applications. Such a fundamental mismatch between theory and tools is among the causes of pervasive cyber insecurity. We introduce the sectoral capability maturity model to enable a comprehensive improvement of systemic resilience. The promoting global cyber resilience for sectors cyber-capability maturity model incorporates the science of complex systems, cybersecurity frameworks, and two decades of CIP operations experience. The model was successfully applied in resilience assessment projects in a dozen countries. Real-life experience emphasizes the benefits of the sectoral approach to cyber resilience: creating feedback loops within the sector, integrating supply chain and third-party risks, facilitating information flows between stakeholders, enabling cooperation with and among ministries, departments and other authorities, weighting in the links and processes between actors in cybersecurity issues. The established value of the sectoral approach calls for applications that will improve the resilience of essential services while lowering sector-wide cybersecurity expenditures.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the antimicrobial stewardship workforce in Scottish acute care hospitals-a qualitative study.

Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programmes seek to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance by minimizing inappropriate antimicrobial use. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was characterized by initial widespread use of antimicrobials in patients with COVID-19, with potential negative effects on AMS efforts. To explore the impact of the pandemic on the AMS workforce in Scottish acute care hospitals. Individual, semi-structured online interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of clinical staff who had an AMS focused role in Scottish Health Boards. Interviews explored staff experiences of facilitating AMS during the pandemic. Data were analysed using inductive content analysis. Thirteen staff from seven of 15 Scotland Health Boards participated. The data revealed negative (including staff redeployment and shortages) and positive effects (including improved working relationships and use of technology) on the AMS workforce. Notably, greater appreciation of the work of the AMS team was a positive outcome. The robust qualitative methods applied in this original study have generated greater understanding of factors that impeded AMS services in Scotland during the pandemic. These findings may resonate internationally. Adaptation to technology and investment in the workforce are recommended to improve the resilience of AMS services in future crises.

THE RESILIENCE OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND VITAL FUNCTIONS AND SERVICES: THE FORMALIZATION OF THE TASKS AND CONTENT OF STAKEHOLDER’S ACTIONS

In the article, the author analyzes the content and tasks of activity to implement the concept of resilience. The article begins with a short overview of the theoretical background of the resilience concept and examines legislation on national resilience recently approved in several countries. The author then demonstrates the relevance of the research regarding the resilience of life-supporting vital functions and services and of critical infrastructure under Ukrainian law. The main tasks and challenges of stakeholders in a certain domain of regulation are outlined, along with an approach to rationalize the content of activities. Next, examples of typical response measures by stages of the crisis response cycle to ensure resilience of certain areas of regulation are given. Ukraine’s response to power supply disruptions due to the destruction of the energy infrastructure by Russia in autumn-winter of 2022–2023 are summarized. The author provides a conceptual model for the formalization of objectives, goal setting and development of regulatory tools to ensure the resilience of vital functions and services and functioning of critical infrastructure. This model is extended with a description of the approach for designing the target parameters of response measures and for determining the necessary and possible levels of performance of critical infrastructure or/and vital services within the goals of the area of regulation in focus. This includes an example of the usage of the model developed to justify measures for ensuring continuity of power supply to communities. The author then proposes principles to determine the actors responsible for resilience planning at different levels of governance. He demonstrates the differences in the remit and authorities of various participants and the need to develop a separate formal tool, which prescribes the activities of all participants involved in ensuring community resilience. Finally, the author outlines a proposed structure and content of community resilience plans.

Security Evaluation Framework for Virtualised Environments

With the expansion of cloud computing, virtual environments remain susceptible to sophisticated security threats, such as hypervisor vulnerabilities, VM escapes, inter-VM attacks, DoS attacks, and malware injections. Hence, ensuring that virtualised environments are secure, has become increasingly crucial. These threats are particularly affecting as many enterprises which have shifted to online services and remote work. This paper examines the existing frameworks which have been designed to address the existing challenges, their gaps and strengths; and proposes an enhanced security framework that can help to mitigate these threats. The framework was developed following an iterative process encompassing several stages. It has the hypervisor layer, virtual machine layer, network layer, management layer, and monitoring and response layer components. The framework aims to enhance detection capabilities, reduce response times, minimise system performance impact, and lower false positive rates while optimising resource utilisation by providing a practical and effective approach to securing virtualised infrastructures, thereby ensuring the resilience and reliability of cloud-based services.

Assessment on resilience of urban agglomeration transportation system considering passenger choice and load-capacity factor

Intercity transportation system (ICTS), characterized by large-scale, high spatial-temporal concentration, and sparser departure frequencies, is more vulnerable in unexpected events. Understanding the resilience characteristics of ICTS is crucial for maintaining the network service capabilities. Aiming to conduct effective resilience assessment on ICTS, we develop the resilience simulation model by introduce dual-regulated parameters for network load and capacity into cascading propagation model under interruption events, and quantify the impact of travel distance, time costs, and route redundancy on travel choice of passengers. Meanwhile, propose service resilience indicators from both the passenger's and the system's perspectives. Finally, we conduct a case study on the resilience of ICTS in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomerations (BTH-UA). The results show that: 1) Multimodal transportation systems usually exhibit better resilience than unimodal systems. 2) For various resilience optimization metrics, it is essential to choose targeted recovery strategies to maximize network resilience. 3) Traveler sensitivity to travel time significantly influences the resilience of passenger-based network services. 4) Changes in transportation supply capacity and travel demand will impact the system's resilience. The research findings can provide valuable references for the resilience development and management of urban transportation systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused gender-specific declines in knee surgery rates in Sweden from 2020 to 2021.

Changes in knee surgery incidence are important factors for stakeholders and healthcare providers. The aim of this study was to examine trends and patterns in knee surgeries in Sweden from 2010 to 2022. The study focuses on gender-specific and overall rates of knee surgeries. The analysis is based on a data set sourced from national healthcare records. The data was stratified based on surgical rates and categorized by gender, year and the specific knee arthroplasty technique used. We tracked year-to-year changes in surgical rates to identify overarching patterns. We used Poisson regression to predict future trends. Comparisons were made between various surgical subcategories, such as those with and without cement in knee arthroplasty surgeries. In 2010, the rate of knee surgeries per 100,000 person-years was 518.7 for males and 448.0 for females. These rates exhibited fluctuations over time, reaching their lowest point in 2020, attributed to the pandemic's disruption of elective procedures, with 386.4 surgeries per 100,000 males and 386.3 surgeries per 100,000 females. A resurgence was observed in 2022. The rates of primary knee arthroplasty increased, with a male rate of 106.2 and a female rate of 150.7 surgeries per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010, rising to 126.8 for males and 166.2 for females in 2022. This comprehensive nationwide open-source data analysis of knee surgeries in Sweden shows that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted knee surgery rates in Sweden, causing a notable decline in 2020, followed by a resurgence in 2022. Furthermore, while men had higher surgery rates than women, they experienced a larger decline in the incidence of knee surgeries compared to women. Understanding these trends is crucial for stakeholders and healthcare providers to improve resource allocation, address gender disparities, and maintain the resilience of surgical services in the face of disruptions. Level III.

Cyclone Freddy and its impact on maternal health service utilisation: Cross-sectional analysis of data from a national maternal surveillance platform in Malawi.

Climate change poses a significant threat to women's health in sub-Saharan Africa, yet the impact of climate change on maternal health is rarely reported in the region. Using an existing Maternal Surveillance Platform (MATSurvey), we estimated the immediate impact of Cyclone Freddy on maternal health care service indicators in Malawi. We analysed facility-level data for pregnant women up to 42 weeks post-partum using the national MATSurvey database. We compared incidences of service utilisation before (1 January to 19 February 2023) and after (20 February to 30 March 2023) the cyclone using a negative binomial regression approach. Between 1 January and 30 March 2023, a total of 37,445 live births, 50,048 antenatal clinic attendances, 23,250 postnatal clinic attendances, 84 maternal deaths, and 1,166 neonatal deaths were recorded by 33 facilities in the MatSurvey database. There was an immediate reduction in service utilisation in the post-cyclone period, including the postnatal attendance per week (pre-cyclone median: 355.0 [IQR 279.0-552.0], post-cyclone median: 261.0 [IQR 154.3-305.5], RR 0.56 [95% CI 0.44-0.71, p <0.001]) and the antenatal attendance per week (pre-cyclone median: 860.0 [IQR 756.5-1060.0], post-cyclone median: 656.5 [IQR 486.5-803.3], RR 0.66 [95% CI 0.55-0.78, p <0.001]). Stratified analyses by geographical zones revealed a stronger reduction in postnatal clinic attendance in the Southwest (RR 0.50 [95% CI 0.29-0.85, p = 0.010]) and the North (RR 0.29 [95% CI 0.15-0.56, p <0.001]). Cyclone Freddy resulted in an immediate decline in utilisation of maternal health services in cyclone-affected regions in Malawi. We observe evidence of catastrophic climate events impacting on the healthcare of women and their babies. Policymakers, researchers, and health systems need to ensure that essential women's health services are maintained during these events and improve measures to support service resilience in the face of climate change.

The trade-offs effect of ecosystem health and socio-economic development on tea production

Ecosystem health (EH) maintenance and improvement are important goals in environmental and ecological management, and help realize regional sustainable development goals. EH assessment and the regulatory mechanism have remained popular research fields in landscape ecology science. However, the improvement in EH assessment methods is ongoing, the influences of EH and socioeconomic development on agricultural production remain unclear. In this study, we chose Fujian Province in China as the study area, first quantitatively assess EH based on the Vigor–Organization–Resilience–Services (VORS) model, and thereafter explore the response of tea production to EH and socioeconomic development using the structural equation model (SEM). We found that the mean EH value in Fujian Province was 0.52 in 2010, which was 6.12% and 10.64% higher than that in 2000 and 2020, respectively. The high-EH-value regions were distributed in the northwest, while the southeastern regions exhibited low-EH-value agglomerations. According to the temporal evolution characteristics of EH, the kernel density curve patterns exhibited single peaks, and the curves shifted from a broad to a narrow peak from 2000 to 2020, indicating a trend toward a more balanced distribution of EH spatially. SEM results showed a significant positive effect of EH on tea production with a coefficient of 0.86. However, there is a significant trade-off between EH and economic development, as indicated by a coefficient of −0.6. There are also negative indirect effects on tea development when mediated by economic development. However, the overall effect of EH on tea production is 0.8, indicating that EH is still effective in promoting tea production. The results of this study have implications for the integration of ecosystem management and agricultural production management in the region.

Agricultural specialisation increases the vulnerability of pollination services for smallholder farmers

Abstract Smallholder farms make up 84% of all farms worldwide and feed 2 billion people. These farms are heavily reliant on ecosystem services and vulnerable to environmental change, yet under‐represented in the ecological literature. The high diversity of crops in these systems makes it challenging to identify and manage the best providers of an ecosystem service, such as the best pollinators to meet the needs of multiple crops. It is also unclear whether ecosystem service requirements change as smallholders transition towards more specialised commercial farming—an increasing trend worldwide. Here, we present a new metric for predicting the species providing ecosystem services in diverse multi‐crop farming systems. Working in 10 smallholder villages in rural Nepal, we use this metric to test whether key pollinators, and the management actions that support them, differ based on a farmers' agricultural priority (producing nutritious food to feed the family vs. generating income from cash crops). We also test whether the resilience of pollination services changes as farmers specialise on cash crops. We show that a farmers' agricultural priority can determine the community of pollinators they rely upon. Wild insects including bumblebees, solitary bees and flies provided the majority of the pollination service underpinning nutrient production, while income generation was much more dependent on a single species—the domesticated honeybee Apis cerana. The significantly lower diversity of pollinators supporting income generation leaves cash crop farmers more vulnerable to pollinator declines. Regardless of a farmers' agricultural priority, the same collection of wild plant species (mostly herbaceous weeds and shrubs) were important for supporting crop pollinators with floral resources. Promoting these wild plants is likely to enhance pollination services for all farmers in the region. Synthesis and applications. We highlight the increased vulnerability of pollination services when smallholders transition to specialised cash crop farming and emphasise the role of crop, pollinator and wild plant diversity in mitigating this risk. The method we present could be readily applied to other smallholder settings across the world to help characterise and manage the ecosystem services underpinning the livelihoods and nutritional health of smallholder families.

TRANSFORMING CYBERSECURITY FOR RESILIENT SMART SERVICES - A CASE STUDY OF THE HAGUE

Cyber-attacks and adversarial threats to the digital operations of smart cities is a growing concern globally. To address the cybersecurity transformation needs and challenges of interdependent digital operations, the concept of cyber resilience is becoming increasingly significant. This article provides an insight on the concept of cyber resilience, depicts how urban resilience and cyber resilience are inter-related in the context of smart cities, and discusses the cyber resiliency engineering techniques that the enterprises need to consider for deploying cyber resilience capabilities in their digital operations. Finally, the initiatives at The Hague smart city, a cyber resilience leader, are highlighted as a case study to show how these practices can transform cybersecurity for enhancing resilience in smart services.

A Review on Adaptive Strategies for Climate Resilience in Agricultural Extension Services in India

A Review on Adaptive Strategies for Climate Resilience in Agricultural Extension Services in India