social determinants of health. (pollution).Define the concept and discuss how the concept relates to the organization...

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social determinants of health. (pollution).Define the concept and discuss how the concept relates to the organization...

social determinants of health. (pollution).Define the concept and discuss how the concept relates to the organization of a healthy work environment and healthy workforce.

pollution in mining and within the transportation branch – what regulations are in place? How can we connect that to equity and social determinants of health?)

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The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities - the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries.

Health starts in our homes, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities. We know that taking care of ourselves by eating well and staying active, not smoking, getting the recommended immunizations and screening tests, and seeing a doctor when we are sick all influence our health. Our health is also determined in part by access to social and economic opportunities; the resources and supports available in our homes, neighborhoods, and communities; the quality of our schooling; the safety of our workplaces; the cleanliness of our water, food, and air; and the nature of our social interactions and relationships. The conditions in which we live explain in part why some Americans are healthier than others and why Americans more generally are not as healthy as they could be.

Healthy People 2020 highlights the importance of addressing the social determinants of health by including “Create social and physical environments that promote good health for all” as one of the four overarching goals for the decade.1 This emphasis is shared by the World Health Organization, whose Commission on Social Determinants of Health in 2008 published the report, Closing the gap in a generation: Health equity through action on the social determinants of health.2 The emphasis is also shared by other U.S. health initiatives such as the National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities 3 and the National Prevention and Health Promotion Strategy

Creating a Healthy Workplace Environment for Your Employees

A healthy workplace environment is ideal when it comes to maintaining a positive outcome in a stressful atmosphere. The most important thing that influences employee motivation and happiness, and how productive and efficient they can be, all goes down to their working environment.

A healthy workplace environment is good for your company as it could lead to bringing sales for business. A healthy workplace environment improves productivity and reduces costs related to absenteeism, turnover, workers’ compensation, and medical claims.

What is a Healthy Workplace Environment

Healthy does not only constitute as needing medical attention, it could also be the outlook of the workplace and even the surroundings. There are four aspects to look into when creating a healthy workplace environment:

Workplace culture

As mentioned in one of our blog, Creating a Happier Corporate Culture, every company has their own corporate culture that determines its value and it usually creates a standard that employees generally follow. When you have created a positive workplace culture that is being practiced by employees as well as yourself, the environment of the workplace tends to be healthier as everyone would have nothing to be upset or unhappy about.

A great company culture can keep employees productive and even help your company retain the best employees and happy workers are also more likely to stick around.

Physical environment and occupational health & safety

A healthy workplace environment also involves the physical environment of the office or workshop and the occupational health & safety of your employees. Reduce the worry of your employees by looking into the safety of the workplace.

Simple things such as ensuring that all electric cables are covered or taped down with a cable tray to prevent employees from tripping over them are one of the issues, which your employees should not be worried about. Nobody wants to sit underneath a cracked ceiling! So, allow your employees to come to a safe workplace environment.

Health and lifestyle practice

Employees will care for the company they are working for if they know that they are being looked after. Employees are the best asset of every organisation, and putting effort into employee wellness can encourage better teamwork, increased productivity and reduce sick leave and workplace accidents.

You can help your employees to develop and maintain healthy lifestyle practices and drop any unhealthy and/or risky habits that they may have. Having weekly yoga sessions or evening runs with the team are one of those activities that promote and encourage a healthy lifestyle. You can get more ideas on our blog, Great Ways to Encourage Better Employee Health.

Supportive workplace environment

Everyone has personal problems and it is only human that some personal emotions get brought into the workplace. Try not to ignore them but instead, find the core of the problem and be a supportive employer by showing concern. Your employee may come in to work depressed due to a passing a loved one or they had a terrible weekend.

As an employee, show compassion and be there for them. You do not need to sit by them the whole day, but by dropping an email, saying your doors are always open for them, shows that you not only care about the progress of the company, but you also care about the well-being of your employee. Remember that a supportive workplace culture is the foundation of a healthy workplace environment.

Ways to Create a Healthy Workplace Environment

A happy (and healthy!) employee is a productive employee. People who enjoy their jobs are more likely to engage thoroughly with their work. As an employee, it is always in your best interest to keep your staff happy; otherwise, resentment could start to impact on the quality of their work or they may even consider leaving.

Here are some ways that you could create a healthy workplace environment:

Promote wellness: You can encourage health and wellness of your employees by having a weekly exercise program such as a yoga session before the start of their work day or an aerobics class after work. This not only encourages a healthy lifestyle among your team but also give them the opportunity to get to know their workmates better.

Engage with different personalities: Every workplace has a combination of characters, and what works to motivate a particular employee, may not necessarily help others. Get to know your employees and find out whether a hands-on approach or more independence will help them.

Fair employee policy: This should apply to all employees regardless of their position or designation in the company. If a supervisor constantly misses deadlines, you should take it as seriously as you would with a junior employee. If your policy changes, ensure everyone knows about it.

Eat healthy: Healthy eating is not about strict dietary restrictions, staying unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. It is about feeling great, having more energy, improving your outlook and your mood. Another great way to create a healthy workplace environment is by eating healthy, and no – skipping lunch break because employees are busy is not a good excuse. Try catering a healthy lunch meal such as salads or sandwiches. You could also provide a bowl of fruits for snacks.

Team building activities: Team building activities not only bond employees closer but also motivate them, creating a positive workplace environment. These activities help improve internal communication and productivity, boosting morale at the workplace and in helping employees get to know each other better. Read our blog on Team Building Ideas for Great Staff Engagement to get some ideas.

Break time: Another great way to create a healthy workplace environment is by encouraging your employees to take a quick 5-minute break from their desk. Regular breaks will assist to relieve muscle fatigue, eyestrain and to restore the level of concentration. There are a couple of apps that you can permanently install on your employees’ desktop, which reminds them take to a break and stretch. Try some of these free apps such as Eyeleo or PC Work Break.

Clean and comfortable office: Working in a clean and comfortable office can have tremendous effects on the interactions among colleagues. Even if your office does not get the sunlight, try to make an effort to provide a relaxing atmosphere with comfortable furniture, working equipment and add a few work lights to make it brighter.

In Summary

Creating a healthy workplace environment does not have to be difficult or costly. A healthy workplace environment improves productivity and reduces costs related to absenteeism, turnover, workers’ compensation, and medical claims. A summary, there are four aspects to look into when creating a healthy workplace environment:

Workplace culture
Physical environment and occupational health & safety
Health and lifestyle practice
Supportive workplace environment

It is ideal when it comes to maintaining a positive outcome in a stressful atmosphere. Deal with problems as soon as possible and regularly ask for feedback on how your workplace could be improved.

Mining and environment — the two do not seem to go together. Indeed, they seem almost antithetical. Whether one reads about small-scale gold mining in the Amazon or huge coal mines in North America, whether simple sand and gravel pits or complex metallurgical operations, the legacy of the mining industry appears to be destruction of land and pollution of air and water. Actually, of course, the situation is much more complex. True, mining always involves disruption of the environment, either at the surface with open-pit mines or underground with deep mines, and in most cases the mineral being sought makes up only a small part of the material that must be moved, with the result that vast quantities of waste must be handled. True too, for many years and in most parts of the world (the North no less than the South), mining was carried on with little regard for environmental protection — or for the health and safety of miners or for the culture and well-being of local communities. However, the picture of mining firms operating with little regard for nature or native is no longer accurate. Under some conditions, and in some corporations, and in some countries, protection of the environment, of miners, and of nearby communities has become nearly as much a concern as putting a rock in the box.

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) funding is based on the principle that solutions to problems in developing countries can only be found through research based in those countries. From this perspective, it is not so much the record of past destruction of the natural environment that is of interest, but the dynamics of a new business environment in which corporate decisions and government legislation work in tandem to avoid damages that are avoidable and to mitigate those that are not. Of course, there remain as many cases where the old conditions persist, and it is equally of interest to learn where and why this new business environment has not appeared.

The early conclusions of the Mining and Environment Research Network (MERN1) were striking: mining firms that are efficient in their main activity of extracting minerals from the Earth are also best at protecting the environment

1 Originally based at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, Unite Kingdom; now based at the International Centre for the Environment, University of Bath, United Kingdom.

while doing so, a conclusion that suggests that, under the right conditions, the economics-environment trade-off is not so sharp as once thought. The further conclusion that environmental results are partially independent of the strength of mining legislation suggests the need for governments to take a more sophisticated approach to mining-environment policy. Corporate attitudes are changing; government policies are changing; civil society is changing: and the business environment that brings them all together is changing. The need for further research is almost self-evident.

IDRC's interest in mining in developing countries predates today's recognition of environmental values and its focus on mining-environment policy. During the 1980s, research projects funded by IDRC focused mainly on science and technology policy for mining or on measures to improve efficiency. With the partial exception of a couple of projects that investigated health conditions in Bolivian mines (in particular, the effects of living and working at high altitudes), environment was very much secondary. An explicit environmental project related to mining does not appear until 1991, and somewhat ironically the first such project was the Bolivian component in the initial phase of MERN, as described in Chapter 8 in this book. Other projects looked at the effects of mercury from gold mining. Closely related projects also began to be funded, including some that focused less on environmental problems per se than on conflicts that stemmed from the power of the mining industry to usurp what had been common-property resources. A good example was the dispute over water that occurred between Southern Peru Copper Company and the community of Ilo, just north of Peru's border with Chile. (That research project was undertaken by a community group called LABOR, which then argued its case successfully before the International Water Tribunal in The Hague.) Another line of research that was initiated about the same time involved the effects of macroeconomic conditions and policies in various Latin America countries on the linkage between environmental degradation and mineral operations.

If the analytical focus of mining research funded by IDRC changed from technical efficiency to environmental protection, the geographic focus did not. With the exception of a collection of projects that focused on artisanal mining (mainly for gems) in Africa and Asia, the projects have almost all involved Latin America. This emphasis is not surprising: IDRC's program in South America focuses on the Andean countries, and this region is, perhaps more than any other in the world, dependent on mining for economic health. This focus is likely to continue. As this book appears, IDRC is conducting an inventory of research and researchers on mining and environment in the continent. From this, it is hoped that a long-term strategy for a coordinated program of research, probably focusing on ecosystem health, will emerge. (Ecosystem health is a new approach that links the effects on human health that stem from adverse anthropogenic changes to the natural environment.) The objective would be to determine what changes in government or corporate policies and what forms of community involvement in decision making would do most to protect local and regional ecosystems and, therefore, human health.

For the time being, however, what is needed is analytically sound documentation of the extent and the effects of recent changes in the business environment, as reflected in corporate behaviour and government policy. This is done very effectively, and for a wide range of corporations and conditions, in this first book from MERN

The Mining and Environment Research Network

MERN is an international collaborative research program involving centres of excellence in the major minerals-producing countries of the world. The program was established in 1991, with the aim of helping mining companies to achieve environmental compliance and improve competitiveness in the context of growing environmental regulation and technological innovation.

Our current research examines the relationship between environmental regulation, technical change, and competitiveness in the nonferrous-minerals industry. We investigate how the processes of technological innovation and organizational change can be harnessed to prevent environmental degradation while enhancing productivity and sustainability. The liberalization of investment regimes worldwide, combined with growing environmental regulation and more frequent requirements for an environmental-impact analysis as a precondition for loans, means that objective and well-documented policy analyses are urgently needed to support decision-making in industry, donor agencies, government, and nongovernmental organizations. This program of collaborative research aims to facilitate the global diffusion of such policy analyses and contribute to building international research competence in this area.

Taking this into account and building on our diagnostic research, the next phase of MERN research covers three interrelated themes:

• Comparative analysis of environmental performance and its relationship with production efficiency — MERN research has demonstrated that good environmental management in the firm is more closely related to production efficiency and capacity to innovate than to regulatory regime. Environmental degradation tends to be greatest in high-cost operations working with obsolete technology, limited capital, and inadequate human-resource management. Because these problems are characteristic of much of the minerals production of developing countries, they are a special, but not exclusive, focus of MERN research. A major area of empirical research is an international benchmarking exercise to investigate environmental performance.

• Analysis of international environmental regulations and the definition of improved policy options — Building on an international comparative analysis of the effectiveness of current environmental regulations, researchers are investigating a range of policy approaches to achieve sustained and competitive improvements in environmental management and to achieve pollution prevention, as opposed to pollution treatment. The research will make an original contribution by evaluating the potential of technology transfer and training (particularly if governed by joint-venture agreements and are linked to credit conditionality) to accelerate the development and diffusion of improved environmental-management practices. Researchers are also analyzing the environmental implications of new trade policies and agreements, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

• Toward best practice: corporate trends in environmental management — A preliminary conclusion of MERN research is that technical change, stimulated by the drive for improved competitiveness and the environmental imperative, is reducing both production and environmental costs, to the advantage of those companies that have the resources and capacity to innovate. Our current phase of research is intended to evaluate and compare trends in environmental best practice for nonferrous-minerals production in different socioeconomic and policy contexts, drawing out the lessons for both corporate strategy and government policy. This includes empirical research on planning for closure within the minerals industry.

Past and current sponsors of MERN research and dissemination activities include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; IDRC, Canada; the Overseas Development Administration, United Kingdom; the Economic and Social Research Council, United Kingdom; the OECD, Paris; the US Bureau of Mines; the United Nations Environment Programme, Paris; the Science, Technology, Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Division of the United Nations; Industry, Science and Technology Canada and Environment Canada; the Chinese State Science and Technology Commission; the Columbian Institute for the Development of Science and Industry (Instituto Columbiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y Tecnología), Colombia; the British Council; and a growing number of MERN Industry Club sponsors.

The output of MERN includes ongoing publication of research articles and reports, conference papers, books (including edited volumes of case studies), a biannual bulletin and briefing papers for sponsors, national workshops, and an annual international conference. As the MERN members develop research capability and define new areas of work and as demands on MERN's central resources increase, new funding is being sought. The benefits for MERN's sponsors include full access to MERN's central services and research findings (which include the results of detailed empirical studies in most of the major minerals-producing countries) and to a network of contacts, including interdisciplinary teams in well-placed centres of excellence.