نشریه مدیریت اطلاعات سلامت
سال هجدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 78، خرداد و تیر 1400)

Accreditation is one of the evaluation tools of health care systems, especially hospitals, which is one of the priorities of the Ministry of Health in Iran as well. The third generation of accreditation of Iranian hospitals was developed in the academic year 2016. This study endeavored to determine the challenges of the third generation of hospital accreditation from the perspective of accreditation officials in Isfahan City, Iran.

The qualitative study was conducted through semi-structured interviews with accreditation officials in academic year of 2018 in Isfahan. Ten individuals (due to data saturation) were interviewed in a targeted manner. Data analysis was performed through guided content analysis.

Third-generation accreditation challenges were categorized into three areas: structural, process, and outcome challenges. The structural challenges were related to requirements, culture building, localization, training, metrics, and evaluators. Process challenges were related to how to evaluate, commit, and do teamwork and staff work processes during accreditation, and the resulting challenges were related to service quality and patient satisfaction after accreditation.

In the third generation of accreditation, structural challenges were especially emphasized by the interviewees, especially in terms of program requirements. Removing these obstacles and challenges can make this plan more successful.

Health literacy is defined as the capacity of individuals to obtain, process, and understand health information and services as the basis for appropriate health decisions, and low-health literacy has a variety of adverse outcomes. On the other hand, the importance of measuring the satisfaction of patients' companions is considered as one of the important and basic criteria determining the quality of care services. In view of this, the study was conducted to determine the relationship between health literacy of patients in psychiatric wards and their satisfaction with service providers in the hospitals affiliated to Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.

To conduct this descriptive-applied study, 330 patients from psychiatric wards of hospitals affiliated to Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in the second semester of academic year of 2019 were selected using available sampling method. To collect the data, two standard questionnaires, Health Literacy for Iranian Adults (HELIA) and a researcher-made satisfaction questionnaire (95% Cronbach's alpha), were used. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Pearson correlation test, and Shapiro Wilk test were used to analyze the data.

33.95% of the participants were at level of not-enough health literacy, 22.72% had inadequate health literacy, 18.28% sufficient health literacy, and 15.15% had excellent health literacy. The highest score of satisfaction with hospital services was 3.89 for the guard unit and the lowest score was 3.55 for the writing unit. There was a direct and significant relationship between health literacy of peers and their satisfaction.

The results revealed that the patients with higher health literacy were more satisfied with the services provided by the hospitals. Accordingly, planning to increase the level of health literacy of companions to increase their satisfaction seems necessary. Taking measures such as providing brochures and information pamphlets (during admission and discharge) can help to increase their level of health literacy of patients.

360-degree feedback seems to be a more comprehensive view of appraising capabilities, behavior, competence, and performance of individuals in the organization than other methods of performance appraisal. This study endeavored to appraise librarians’ performance in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Iran, through 360-degree feedback.

This study was conducted with a survey-analysis methodology. The population consisted of 43 librarians, 43 superiors, 43 colleagues, and 80 users; accordingly, census sampling method was employed. Each librarian was assessed by one supervisor, all colleagues, two users, and a self-assessment questionnaire was filled by each librarian. The data was collected by pre-prepared questionnaires by Farajpahlou et al. To analyze the data, Student's t, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Duncan, analysis of variance tests were used.

Librarians’ performance in total (4.37), and status of their performance in moral-value (4.47), functional (4.37), and process (4.34) skills were higher than average level. There was no significant difference between the results of four groups in the moral-value index and functional skills, but there was a significant difference between the users and other assessors in the process skills.

Given the low mean in the process index, it seems necessary to take effective steps by librarians to improve communication with users. These results could be used by managers and librarians to identify the strengths and weaknesses of librarians’ performance.

Abortion refers to the intentional or unintentional termination of a pregnancy before the fetus is able to survive outside the mother's body. The purpose of this study is a thematic analysis of abortion field by researchers in Islamic countries.

This descriptive-analytical study was performed with scientometric approach and using the co-word analysis and network analysis technique. Scientific products of Islamic countries in abortion field were extracted in Web of Science database from 1999 to 2018.

Most documents in the field of abortion were produced by three countries, Turkey, Iran and Egypt, respectively. High-productivity countries have better cooperation in the scientific network. Obstetrics and gynecology and the biology of reproduction are the most important topics for researchers. Out of 12 thematic clusters formed, the medical abortion was the main subject.

The majority of research approach was seen on Induced Abortion, with an emphasis on medical abortion. Some issues such as the threat of abortion, the clinical diagnosis of abortion, and the psychological, social, and legal aspects of the abortion, have received less attention

Considering the important role of ontologies in information organizations and increasing the efficiency of information retrieval systems and the growing development of the Nuclear Medicine field and its concepts, and the need for integrated and coherent organization and precise definition of relationships between these concepts, the present study is aimed at representing terms and concepts and designing the structure of Nuclear Medicine field by implementing an ontology in the mentioned field.

The research method is the field analysis. The required data were gathered from published information sources in the Nuclear Medicine field indexed in the INIS repository from 1985 to 2019 and their country of publication was Iran. The sevenstep method of Noy and McGuinnes has been used to construct the ontology, and the Na and Neo knowledge engineering approach has been used to extract the semantic relationships between the concepts.

Nuclear Medicine Ontology includes 224 concepts, 1584 axioms, 463 conceptual pairs, 926 object properties and 817 annotative properties derived from related information sources indexed in the INIS repository. Existing relationships between conceptual pairs are refined and enriched and described in terms of object and annotative properties.

Nuclear Medicine Ontology is an effective tool for knowledge representation in the mentioned field. The method used to extract the concepts of the field and enrich the relationships between concepts could be the basis for enriching the relations of the INIS Thesaurus and creating a basic ontology in the nuclear Field.

Chaos, information uncertainty, and instability are characteristics of the chaotic situation experienced in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The health system has been severely damaged under such circumstances. The basic way to deal with this situation is to understand the crisis correctly, and accept the chaotic situation. Chaos theory emphasizes solutions that take into account discontinuities in events, and provides appropriate solutions to deal with the problems. Using the features of chaos theory to assist health decision makers and policymakers in managing COVID-19 pandemic, the following recommendations can be proposed: focus on short-term (vs. long-term) decision-making, contingent and flexible planning, proper application of innovative approaches in policymaking, creating structures and systems, discovering order within chaos and disorder. In the health policy system, the managers who change their mental models according to the circumstances instead of following the old principles, develop and implement their activities based on models far from stable and dynamic equilibrium, is an undeniable necessity.