RESUMO
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Women can experience physical abuse, mental, sexual abuse, or even controlling behavior throughout their partnership lifecycle, which must be prevented and curtailed at the early stages. Therefore, this study explores intimate partner violence (IPV) prevalence among Bahraini women, predictors of IPV, and reliability of the Women Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) questionnaire in IPV against women. METHODS: The current prospective cross-sectional study included 810 Bahraini women meeting the inclusion criteria, who were asked to share any IPV experience witnessed during their marriage. A questionnaire comprising of 25 questions, including those of WAST-short and WAST-long, was used. The reliability of the screening tools was determined using Cronbach's alpha test. RESULTS: The prevalence of IPV among Bahraini was found to be 71.11%. During pregnancy, husbands' violent behavior towards family members, relatives or friends; escalation of violence; substance abuse; general antisocial behavior; criminality and mental health issues were significantly associated with IPV (P < 0.001). Relationship problems with the husband, individual behavior of women supporting violence, and history of violence from other family members were significantly associated with abuse (P < 0.05). WAST-short was shown to have a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 18.8%. Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the full questionnaire, WAST-short and WAST-long were 0.82, 0.76, and 0.84, respectively. CONCLUSION: Determination of IPV is an outcome of the victim and abuser's psychosocial behaviors, and WAST-short must be complemented with WAST-long for accurate findings. Concerted efforts towards anger management and rehabilitation of the victim and abuser are imperative to end the IPV cycle.
RESUMO
OBJECTIVES: To measure the quality of care for patients with diabetes mellitus at the outpatient clinics from 12 general practitioners clinics (GPC) and one diabetes care clinic (DCC). METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Al-Razi Health Center, Manama, Bahrain, and health records from January to December 2012 were reviewed. The study consisted of 120 patients from GPC, and 80 patients from DCC. Information regarding quality indicators on the management of diabetic care was gathered, which consisted of data on the adherence rate for each of the 8 processes and 4 intermediate outcomes indicators, and was then compared to the standard target. RESULTS: The average rate for the examination of measurement in GPC for diabetic retina was 0%, diabetic foot was 2%, second microalbuminuria retesting was 13%, and glycosylated hemoglobin test order (HbA1c) was 18%, and in the DCC, 87% (diabetic retina), 97% (diabetic foot), 58% (second microalbuminuria retesting), and 79% (HbA1c). The differences were statistically significant between DCC and GPC. CONCLUSION: This study has found significant differences in the adherence rate of process and clinical outcome indicators across the GPC, an area that requires further improvements. The DCC, however, highly exceeded the target in 7 indicators, while it was relatively far from the target in the other 3 indicators. The study revealed that adherence to process indicators was not associated with good intermediate outcomes.
