Identifying and overcoming barriers to healthier lives

Understanding the key determinants of health from a community perspective is essential to address and improve the health and wellbeing of its members. This qualitative study aimed to explore and better understand New Zealand-based Pasifika communities’ sociocultural experiences and knowledge of health and wellbeing. Fifty-seven participants were involved in six separate focus groups. Community coordinators co-facilitated and transcribed the discussions and conducted thematic analysis. The findings suggested two overarching themes: (1) ‘Pasifika experiences on poor health and wellbeing’: were based on sub-themes: (i) ‘recognisable issues’ (e.g., poor diet and lifestyle behaviours); (ii) ‘systemic issues’ that support the perpetual health issues (e.g., lack of knowledge and education) and; (iii) ‘profound issues’ that are often unspoken of and create long-term barriers (e.g., cultural lifestyle and responsibilities). (2) ‘Hopes and dreams’ to improve health and well-being requires: (i) a family-centric approach to health; (ii) tackling systemic barriers; and (iii) addressing community social justice issues. This study provides deepened insights on Pasifika communities’ understanding healthier living in the context of their cultural environment and family responsibilities. If we are to develop effective, sustainable programmes that prioritises health and well-being based on the needs of Pasifika communities, the findings from this study highlight their needs as step forward in overcoming barriers to healthier lives.fals

Structural Insight into Transition Metal Oxide containing glasses by Molecular Dynamic Simulations

In the last years, glass research focused particular attention on transition metal oxide containing systems for semi-conductive applications, for instance glasses for solid-state devices and secondary batteries. In glass matrices, transition metal ions show multiple oxidation states that lead to peculiar structures and to highly complex systems, which produce interesting optical, electrical and magnetic properties. Computational methods have been largely employed as complementary tool to experimental techniques, in order to improve the knowledge on the materials and their performances. In this work, Molecular Dynamic (MD) simulations have been performed on a series of alkali vanado-phosphate glasses in order to gain deep comprehension of the glass structure. The short and medium range order of the V4+ and the V5+ sites in terms of coordination, pair distribution function, V\u2013O\u2013V linkages, bridging and non-bridging oxygen distributions were calculated and discussed. Finally, the comparison between MD and experimental results shows a very good agreement allowing the validation of the computational models and highlights the correlations between the structure and the conduction mechanism in these glasses. This allows enriching the know-how on these glass systems that result still ambiguous until now