Journal of Community Health Research
Volume:2 Issue: 1, Apr-Jun 2013

Higher education system in each country is mainly responsible for training specialists and efficient personnels in different levels of government. Regarding a community approach, if the system uses social factors properly, goals attainment will be facile. On the contrary, if the system is affected by common social traumas and deviations, it will result in dissonant maladroit graduated students who would trouble themselves, their family and their society. Addiction to narcotic drugs is one of the most important social traumas that is quite common in developing countries. The current descriptive analytic study has been conducted in community of Yazd University in academic year of 2010 -2011. For this purpose, 406 students of this university were selected via stratified random sampling method who responded to a researcher-made questionnaire that its validity and reliability were confirmed utilizing psychometric standards. Regarding data description, frequency indexes, percent, mean, and standard deviation were applied. Moreover, inferential tests of chi-square test and correlation coefficient of Pearson were utilized. The study results revealed that approximately 21/9 percent of students were suggested the drug abuse whose rate of drug use was 25/9 percent. 34/1 percent of subjects determined their friend's homes as the most propitious place for their use and most important reasons involved respectively release of spiritual stress, inability to say "No" in response to others’ suggestion. Furthermore, students’ point of view revealed the significant effect of narcotic drugs use on education process. Any of students’ demographic variables had significant correlation with drug abuse. since one of the most common social traumas associated with youth generation, specially college students, is addiction to narcotic drugs, that in addition to extensive economic loss, it would jeopardize their physical and social health, one of the most important ways to prevent and control the drug use is recognizing its factors as well as the peripheral circumstances of this trauma. Moreover, investigating students’ view point regarding this issue is of great significance that has been regarded in the present study.

The objective of the study was to develop an instrument to measure patient education content. First of all, literature searches were undertaken to determine current national and international patient education questionnaires. Then a forty five item questionnaire was developed. Questionnaires were filled by 399 patients in surgery wards of Kerman medical hospitals. Reliability of the questionnaire was assessed by Cronbach's alpha. Factor analysis in conjunction with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to assess the construct validity of the instrument. The alpha coefficient of the scale was 0.95. Using PCA, a five-factor solution was selected as the most appropriate model, which accounted for nearly 70% of the total variance; disease information, disease complication, drug information, general information, and miscellaneous. Our new questionnaire demonstrates good psychometric properties. This tool helps patients to create a realistic picture of what to expect in the early recovery period at home.

hospitals performance indicators will help monitoring, evaluation and decision making and therefore must be selected and ranked accurately. The aim of present study is identifying and selecting key hospitals performance indicators. This is a descriptive and mixed (quantitative-qualitative) study. literature review and expert panel has been done to identify all performance indicators. we prioritize performance indicators by Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP) technique. The data were analyzed by Excel 2007 and Expert Choice11 software’s. hospital performance indicators are classified to three areas as quality- effectiveness, efficiency- financing and accessibility – equity. Indicators like the rate of hospital average length of stay in hospital based on different diagnosis and the mean rate of inpatient waiting time are considered with highest priority performance indicators of public hospitals. Identifying hospital’s key performance indicators provides an opportunity for health stakeholders to identify critical and problematic points with lower costs and time and to the best correction action.

Given the importance of spirituality and health as well as activities done by hospital personnel, the aim of present study is to evaluate the relationship between spirituality and general health and to assess some possible affecting factors such as demographic and work factors on these variables in hospital staff. This cross-sectional study was done on hospital employees of Yazd Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences. First, 101 hospital staff were selected randomly by using multistage sampling. General Health, spiritual experience and demographic questionnaires as reported by the subjects themselves, were completed. Cut-off point of 23 was considered for general health, So that those, whose score were 23 or less, were considered as healthy individuals. Collected data were entered software SPSS (Ver.19) and then analyzed using Pearson correlation, t-test and ANOVA tests. Mean and standard deviation of spirituality was 251.50 and 42.30 and for general health was 46.79 and 10.82, respectively. Spirituality and general health had a significant negative correlation (p-value=0.03). Spirituality was significantly higher in subjects who were single (p-value=0.04). Men (P-Value=0.01) and those older than 33 years (P-Value=0.001), had significantly better general health. General health significantly associated with service location (P-Value ≤ 0.0001). The study finding shows, increase in spirituality is associated with higher levels of general health. Given that the general health score in this study were higher than the cut-off 23, and physical and mental health of hospital staff is associated with their quality of service at work, so promotion of general health and spirituality in hospitals, which are responsible for public health, is essential.

health literacy is a fundamental part of the healing promotion. The aim of this study was to evaluate periodontal health literacy among patients. 296 patients attending periodontal clinic who were above 16 years old participated in this study. Gathering data was based on screening questions on a 5-point Likert scale. After completion questionnaire, data was analyzed by Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis test. Based on the scores of questions, patients were classified as weak, medium and good health literacy. This study showed significant difference in health literacy between age and education groups (P value = 0.015, P value = 0.003), while there was no significant difference between male and female (P value = 0.54). It was also revealed that patients who had been exposed to oral health education had higher health literacy levels (P value < 0.0001, P value = 0.001). The results of this study showed patients less than 20 years and over 50 years old had poorer heath literacy in relation of periodontal heath, also, patients with higher educational level have higher health literacy.

Reverse osmosis (RO) is best known for its use in desalination (removing the salt from seawater to get fresh water), but since the early 1970s it has also been used to purify fresh water for medical, industrial, and domestic applications. The aim of this research was the performance study of reverse osmosis plants for water desalination in Bandar-Lengeh, Iran. In this study the concentrations of a number of physical, chemical and biological quality parameters in raw and treated water of Bandar-Lengeh water Desalination Plants were determined and Performance of RO plants for seawater and costal groundwater desalination were studied. There are two desalination plants in Bandar-Lengeh. Water from these plants are used for municipal supply. Total production capacity of the two RO desalination plants is 8000 m3/d. The results of this study showed average values of TDS, Sodium, Chloride, Sulfate, diatomaceous and Nematodes in seawater were 37749 mg/l; 9715 mg/l; 22020 mg/l; 3067 mg/l; 24337 N/100ml and 5 N/100ml and in treated water were 1233 mg/l; 436 mg/l; 710 mg/l; 58 mg/l, 0 N/100ml and 0 N/100ml, respectively. Also the results showed average values of TDS, Sodium, Chloride and Sulfate in coastal ground water were 37131 mg/l; 9303 mg/l; 21072 mg/l; 3745 mg/l; and in treated water were 687mg/l; 253 mg/l; 389 mg/l; 19 mg/l, respectively. The results showed the quality of feed water and pretreatment plays an extremely important role in operational problems such as fouling of RO systems.

The carry of heavy backpacks by school children may be associated with several potential health consequences. The aim of this study was to determine the percentage of body weight represented by school backpacks and other related factors. The cross-sectional study has been done in eight primary schools in Yazd city in which a total of 783 students’ boys (217 subjects in boys’ private schools and 566 ones in boy's governmental schools), grades 1 to 5, were studied. Measures included body mass and school bag weight of students and then the relative backpack weight (RBW) was calculated as percentage of body weight. The average backpack weight was 4.6 kg (range, 1.3 kg to 20.6 kg) and represented 12.9% (range, 5.5% to 37%) of the subjects’ body weights. In private schools, about 43.7% of the students carried backpacks weighing less than 10 percent, 38.4% between 10 – 14% and 17.9% of the students 15 percent or more of their body weights versus 66.2%, 23.5% and 10.3% in governmental schools, respectively. The majority of students carried their bags over one or two shoulders and only 4% used roller bags. The contents of backpacks were mainly text books, exercise books or test books. In conclusion the result of this study indicated that the students of private schools carried heavier backpacks than those of governmental ones and therefore it appears to be reasonable to lighten the load of backpacks and educate students for carrying correctly school backpacks.