مژگان فرشادی

Medical tourism is one of the important sub-branches of the tourism industry. One of the factors influencing the choice of hospital by the tourist is the way of providing hotel services in hospitals.

The research was a descriptive correlational study conducted in 2009 in selected private hospitals in Tehran. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect information about the components of hoteling and a Shahroudi questionnaire was used to examine the observance of the components affecting the attraction of health tourists. The samples included 78 employees of the international department of two private hospitals in Tehran. To measure normality, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests and multivariate regression and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to measure and determine the relationship between variables by SPSS 21.

This study showed that there is a significant relationship between the six pillars of hospital hotels with the attraction of medical tourists. Pillars of "buildings and installations" (p <0.05), (r = 0.231), "equipment and facilities" (p <0.05), (r = 0.263), "welfare services" (P <0.05), (r = 0.357), "cleaning and hygiene services" (p <0.05) and (r = 0.234), "nutrition" (p <0.01), (r = 0.393), and "administrative affairs and workflow" (p <0.01), (r = 0.332), are directly correlated with the attraction of medical tourists. It was also found that "human resources" is not correlated with the attraction of medical tourists.

In order to attract more medical tourists, it’s necessary that hospital managers and health policy makers pay more attention to the hoteling pillars, especially "nutrition" and "administrative affairs and workflow", which have the most correlation with attracting medical tourists.

The relationship between medical universities and teaching hospitals is a challenging issue. Lack of appropriate relations can create challenges in hospital management and its various functions, such as providing services, education and research. Therefore, this study was conducted to understand the current challenges of the relationship a university of medical sciences using different stakeholders' perspectives.

For data collection, 33 semi structured in-depth interviews and one focused group discussion were conducted. The participants were selected through targeted and snowball sampling, from educational hospitals and university departments. Qualitative content analysis method using qualitative analysis software, MAXQDA, was used for analyzing data. Coding and classification of codes were done by two researchers independently.

After conceptual categorization, the obtained categories were turned into 14 sub-themes and 4 main themes of “decision and policy making”, “resource provision”,” supervision and evaluation” and “information flow”. All these themes are subsets of the main “unity” theme.

analysis of the condition and related challenges emphasized the need for a revision of the relationships between educational hospitals and university departments. According to scientific evidence, this reform should focus on decentralization in order to increase hospitals decision-making power in different aspects. Obviously, due to social responsibility of university and hospitals and the necessity of their accountability to educational expectations and therapeutic needs of the community, the university governance and supervision role should be well defined and implemented correctly.

Objective (s): Decision making about characteristics of reward system is one of the main challenges in organizations. The current study was carried out in order to design and provide a reward system for staff working in hospital affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) hospitals.
Methods This study was performed in two steps from May 2014 to January 2016 in Tehran. First, the research team identified the main axes of reward system using semi-structured interviews with experts and stakeholders. Then the list of final criteria for rewarding was prepared in addition to weight for each criterion using ‘pairwise comparison analysis’. Secondly, in order to identify the executive requirements, the model was implemented in one hospital as a pilot. The main aspects of reward system were scoring method; type of reward; awareness program; evaluation; executive requirements (including structure and process). After pilot study criteria and scoring method were improved. Although the findings were promising, it seems for model success defining executive requirements (including process and structure) proportionate to available capacities and advocacy from head and senior managers is essential.