No abstract

Context: Communication, as an essential human skill, is one of the most influential factors in the performance of healthcare workers. In fact, the establishment of effective communication with the recipients of healthcare services and patients can increase their satisfaction and quality of life. Due to the paucity of comprehensive research in this area, the present study aimed to investigate the barriers and facilitating factors concerning communication among healthcare workers.

Urban air quality is a major concern throughout the world. The concentration of human activities in a relatively small area puts enormous pressure on urban systems and has led to numerous environmental problems which have created major problems for urban air quality management. The complex nature of air pollution, especially with respect to health impacts in urban areas, has prompted attempts to define the so-called indicators that condense and simplify the available monitoring data to make them suitable for public reporting and decision makers. Several concepts and indicators exist to measure and rank urban areas in terms of their infrastructural, socioeconomic and environment-related parameters. In past four decades different indices have been introduced, such as Pollutant Standards Index, Air Quality Index (AQI), Air Quality Health Index and Aggregate Risk Index, but none of them have considered importance of the integrated health, environment and safety factors relevant to the extended risk factors involved, such as diverse economic losses and negative socioeconomic aspects. Therefore an integrated AQI, so-called, Air Quality Risk Index which considers environmental conditions, and economic losses involved were applied for the city of Tehran as a megacity. The results indicated that this index can be applied to define the actual condition(s) of urban air quality and to achieve sustainability and resiliency.

No abstract

Journal homepage: www.zums.ac.ir/jhehp Background: Identification of hazards is one of the most important parts of industries' strategies. This can be done using a hazard matrix as an applicable tool which can also rank hazards properly. Methods: In this study, the Delphi method was used to select best alternatives for a hazard matrix. All possible items were gathered and passed Delphi rounds, in which mean, median and standard deviation were used to evaluate decisions. Moreover, Kendall's coefficient of concordance was used to reach consensus between panel members. Results: The panel members found 42 items in five categories, of which 29 items benefited a mean and median more than 5. Moreover, Kendall's coefficient of concordance reached 0.66, which indicated a statistically meaningful agreement for the number of experts. Conclusion: This study introduced a hazard matrix, in which different consequences were accounted based on a well-known decision making method. The matrix is developed for hospital application with respect to panel members' knowledge and can be used suitably in this field of industry.