Necessity of accreditation standards for quality assurance of medical basic sciences

The present article reviews the significance of accreditation standards while emphasizing the necessity of implementation of such standards by basic medical science council, with an eye on such international standards as those published by WFME. This review article had to decide on the key words and expressions, data bases, to review relevant literature, review higher and medical education journals at GOOGLE, ELSEVIER, PUBMED, and such web sites as those of WFME and WMA's. Accreditation is a powerful leverage for institutional change and improvement and must be actively supported by academic and national health authorities worldwide. Considering the mission of the Basic Medical Science, Health and Post grad. Education, Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Tehran, Iran as accountable medical education, all specialists of the spectrum of disciplines agreed on the necessity of formulating the medical education standards for all disciplines of their interest. It is important that all efforts be joined in the endeavor to create effective and reliable instruments for quality assurance of Basic Medical Sciences Education

Faculty members attitude toward academic advising and counseling and their viewpoints about counseling duties

Advising and counseling students, a part of faculty members' duties, is a way for overcoming preventable problems and educational failure due to those problems. The aim of this study was to determine the attitude of faculty members of Kerman University of Medical Sciences toward advising and counseling students and their views about the duties of counselor faculty members. In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 164 faculty members were investigated using a questionnaire. The attitude questions of this questionnaire had the validity and reliability of 0.8 and 0.67, respectively. The reliability of 0.8 was calculated for questions of counselor duties. The gathered data was analyzed by SPSS software, using t-tests and one way ANOVA. Seventy seven percent of faculty members had the experience of student counseling, 82.6% were aware of counseling duties, and 86.7% were completely agree or agree with counselor's duties. In total, 74.3% of the faculty members achieved the total score of attitude. A significant difference was observ-ed between the mean scores of the attitude based on the variables of academic rank and being aware of counselor's duties. With regard to almost positive attitude of faculty members towards counseling and advising, and their agreement with the duties approved by ministry, there is no doubt that having enough and appropriate knowledge and competency in performing counseling tasks in order to help the students is essential. Therefore, informing and educating faculty members regarding student advising and counseling are recommended

Knowledge, attitude and preventive practice of women concerning osteoporosis

To determine the knowledge, attitude and preventive practice of women above 45 years old. A total of 770 households in Kerman [southern Iran] were selected for inclusion in the study using cluster sampling from April through August 2005. The interview schedule consisted of 4 parts including questions about knowledge, attitude and practice [KAP] and also demographic questions. The average score for KAP was 9.3 out of 21, 2.6 out of 5 and 1.5 out of 6, respectively. Adequate osteoprotective exercise and sufficient calcium intake were found in 3.8% and 5.5% of subjects, respectively. A significant relationship between the score of preventive practice and all the following parameters was found: level of education, hearing about osteoporosis, knowledge score, perceived barrier to preventive actions and perceived seriousness of osteoporosis. Considering the Iranian women's inaccurate or insufficient knowledge and their negative attitude to the preventive actions and their weak practice in case of prevention, it is the responsibility of health policymakers and medical associations to plan for osteoporosis education and prevention initiatives

sources and their rate of use by interns for learning clinical skill

Centers presenting clinical skills training in medical schools improve the students' ability in practical skills, provide an appropriate setting to practice in an experimental setting and prevent probable mistakes in a real setting. This study is an attempt to determine the interns' attitudes in Kerman University of Medical Sciences about the amount and the resources of acquiring elementary clinical skills through self-assessment. All interns, who passed the clinical skills course, participated in this cross- sectional study in 2004. A researcher made questionnaire was used to gather the data and t-test and ANOVA were used to analyze them. Most of the respondents believed a separate center as clinical skills center was necessary. Vital signs measurement, NG-tube placement and communicating with patients [18,35,17,76, and 17,3, respectively] got the highest scores in acquiring skills [stagger's self-assessment] and the lowest scores were for cauterization, intubations and surgical tools identification [9,09, 12,84 and 14,11, respectively]. The mean of self-assessment score was 76, 7%. The most used resources to acquire skills were clinical skills ward [41%], self-learning [29%] and the professors and others [27%]. Since the self-assessment score was low and as the clinical skills center was used the most to acquire skills, improving training in this center and expanding its activities is necessary

attitudes of Kerman medical school interns toward social medicine course

Background: interns' attitude has strong association with their experience and judgment. It is actually one of the effective factors influencing the development and modification of medical education

Purpose: the present study was carried out in order to compare the attitude of interns before and after the training course of social medicine

Methods: in this quasi-experimental study data was gathered by using a questionnaire with internal consistency coefficient of 0.86% and 0.89% respectively before and after the course. Interns were selected via convenience sampling. Interns filled out pretest [before taking the course] and post test [after taking the course] questionnaires and the results were compared and analyzed through parametric and nonparametric tests

Results: a total of100 students participated in the study. There was significant difference in mean of attitude score between pretest and post test results [P<0.05]. In order to compare the rank of each attitude item in the two stages, "Sign test" was used. All 27 items showed significant difference [P<0.05]. No significant difference was observed between two sexes in both pre and post tests

Conclusion: according to the results of the present study, researchers found out that social medicine training courses had considerable effects on interns' attitude and could cause alterations in their attitude toward social medicine objectives