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Initiated by the service user movement, recovery-oriented practices are one of the keystones of modern mental health care. Over the past two decades, substantial gains have been made with introducing recovery-oriented practice in many areas of mental health practice, but there remain areas where progress is delayed, notably, the psychiatric inpatient environment. The peer support workforce can play a pivotal role in progressing recovery-oriented practices. The purpose of this paper is to provide a pragmatic consideration of how occupational therapists can influence mental health systems to work proactively with a peer workforce.

The authors reviewed current literature and considered practical approaches to building a peer workforce in collaboration with occupational therapists.

It is suggested that the peer support workforce should be consciously enhanced in the inpatient setting to support culture change as a matter of priority. Occupational therapists working on inpatient units should play a key role in promoting and supporting the growth in the peer support workforce. Doing so will enrich the Occupational Therapy profession as well as improving service user outcomes.

This paper seeks to provide a pragmatic consideration of how occupational therapists can influence mental health systems to work proactively with a peer workforce.

Using COVID-19 pandemic as a more immediate empirical reference, this paper aims to understand the biosecurity risks arising from tourist activities and, through a more prospective analysis, to consider the relevance of public health issues in the context of tourism-sustainability nexuses.

The text assumes a hybrid format, incorporating elements resulting from empirical research and essayistic viewpoints. The collection of empirical elements was based on documental research in several sources, such as newspapers, international institutions of an intergovernmental nature and the discussion forum of the travel platform TripAdvisor.

By assuming mobility and large agglomerations of people from different origins, mass tourism has fostered multiple outbreaks of COVID-19 and the rapid global spread of contagion chains. The pandemic clearly exemplified the responsibility of tourism in the dispersion of biotic agents with severe ecological, economic, social and public health repercussions. It is, therefore, urgent to rethink the tourism growth trajectory and more effectively consider the biosecurity risks associated with mobility in discussions on tourism and sustainability. At the same time, tourism must be delineated in terms of the great aims of sustainability, and this transversal purpose to which it contributes should be considered an intrinsic condition of its own sectorial sustainability as an economic activity.

The biosecurity challenges posed by mass tourism are a very topical issue, still little considered in sustainability policies and on which there is a marked deficit in scientific research.