Customer's self-audit to improve the technical quality of maternity care in Tabriz: a community trial

Pregnant women have a major role to play in assessing and improving their own quality of care. This study in Tabriz, Islamic Republic of Iran, aimed to assess the effectiveness of an intervention for pregnant women-based on education and support groups and involvement in quality assessment activities-in order to improve the technical quality of public maternity care at public health centres. The intervention phase took place between September 2012 and may 2013. The outcome measure was health-care providers' degree of adherence to the Iranian maternity care standards. An intervention group of 92 pregnant women from 10 health centres was compared with a control group of 93 pregnant women from 11 centres. Logistic regression analysis showed that the self-assessed technical quality of maternity care received by the women was significantly better in the intervention that the control group for several of the standards concerning clinical examinations, maternal education and vitamin and mineral supplements

Iranian public trust in health services: evidence from Tabriz, Islamic Republic of Iran

This study investigated public trust in health services in Tabriz, Islamic Republic of Iran. A cross-sectional household study was conducted in 2014, using random cluster sampling. A total of 1050 households were enrolled in the study and a valid questionnaire was used to collect data through interviews. The mean score for public trust in health services in Tabriz [out of 100] was 53.91 +/- 13.7. People had most trust in professional expertise and lowest in macro-level policy. Specialists, pharmacy doctors and nurses were the health providers that enjoyed the highest levels of trust. It is concluded that public trust in health services in Tabriz is low and policy-makers need to employ appropriate policies to improve patients' experience of health services

[Systematic survey of accreditation models for designing a national model]

People, patients, governments and third party payers seek indepth accurate assessment of health care quality world wide. To meet this aim, countries have different approaches to improving quality and standards, which licensure, certification and accreditation are some of these systems developed for this purpose. Because of maximum and challenging standards, accreditation is distinguished as the most powerful method. The aim of this study was to perform a systematic review of advantages and disadvantages of accreditation models to select and use as the reference model to develop a national accreditation model. In this study, a systematic review was conducted in SID, Ovid Medline and PubMed databases using key words of accreditation, hospital, medical practice, clinic, accreditation models and health care in both English and Persian languages. Considering defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, 2379 articles were identified. After that, based on the advantages and disadvantages of accreditation models, titles, abstracts and content of selected articles were studied step by step and finally 83 articles were selected and analyzed. Then the findings were extracted and summarized in the summary tables. Finally, based on 25 selected items the best accreditation models in the world were compared with one another in order to develop a national model. The accreditation models which were of much debate were JCAHO from USA and CCHSA from Canada, and the accreditation models of UK, Australia and France were in the next places. The results of this study were compatible with those of previous studies. According to the comparative items the accreditation models of JCAHO and CCHSA had the most advantages and the least disadvantages respectively. Based on the defined items, the JCAHO accreditation model and then CCHSA model are the models which can be best applied and other important accreditation models such as ACHS of Australia, ANAES of France, QHNZ of New Zealand and UK accreditation models are almost as the same level as JCAHO and CCHSA models. Therefore it seems that the Joint Commission accreditation model [JCAHO] is the best model which can be used as a benchmark to design a national accreditation model