Background:Identifying and employing appropriate learning styles could play an important role in selecting teaching styles in order to improve education.Objectives:This study aimed to determine the relationship between learning styles preferences and gender, educational major and status in first year students at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences.Patients and Methods:A cross-sectional study employing the visual-aural-read/write-kinesthetic (VARK) learning style’s questionnaire was done on 184 first year students of medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing and health services management at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2012. The validity of the questionnaire was assessed through experts’ views and reliability was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficients (α = 0.86). Data were analyzed using the SPSS ver.18 software and x2 test.Results:Out of 184 participants who responded to and returned the questionnaire, 122 (66.3%) were female; more than two-thirds (68.5%) of the enrolled students were at the professional doctorate level (medicine, pharmacy, dentistry) and 31.5% at the undergraduate level (nursing and health services management). Eighty-nine (48.4%) students preferred a single-modal learning style. In contrast, the remaining 95 students (51.6%) preferred multi-modal learning styles. A significant relationship between gender and single modal learning styles (P = 0.009) and between status and learning styles (P = 0.04) was observed.Conclusions:According to the results, male students preferred to use the kinesthetic learning style more than females, while, female students preferred the aural learning style. Knowledge about the learning styles of students at educational institutes is valuable and helps solve learning problems among students, and allows students to become better learners.

Objective. Medication errors are the most common types of medical errors which considerably endanger the patient safety. This survey aimed to study the factors influencing not reporting on medication errors from the nurses' viewpoints in Abbasi Hospital of Miandoab, Iran. Methods. This was a cross-sectional, descriptive and analytical study conducted in 2012 in which all nurses (n = 100) working in different inpatient units were studied using a consensus method. Required data were collected using a questionnaire. Collected data were analyzed through some statistical tests including Independent t-test, ANOVA, and chi-square. Results. According to the results, the most important reasons for not reporting on medication errors were related to the managerial factors (3.56 ± 0.996), factors related to the process of reporting (3.32 ± 0.797), and fear of the consequences of reporting (3.01 ± 1.039), respectively. Also, there was a significant relationship between employment status and fear of the Consequences of reporting on medication errors (P < 0.008). Conclusion. This study results showed that managerial factors had the greatest role in the refusal of reporting on medication errors. Therefore, for example, establishing a mechanism to improve quality rather than focus only on finding the culprits and blaming them can result in improving the patient safety.

The study showed that 60.87% of the studied hospitals had low performance in terms of either BOR or BTO, or both. Thus, the analysis on why that low performance may have occurred, and suggestions to enhance future performance, is provided.

Background and objective:Equality in distribution of health care facilities is the main cause for access and enjoyment to the health. The aim of this study was to examine the regional disparities in health care facilities across the Markazi province.Methods:This was a cross-sectional study. Study sample included the cities of Markazi province, ranked based on 15 health indices. Data was collected by a data collection form made by the researcher using statistical yearbook. The indices were weighted using Shannon entropy. Finally, technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) was used to rank the towns of the province in terms of access to health care facilities.Results:There is a large gap between cities of Markazi province in terms of access to health care facilities. Shannon entropy introduced the number of urban health centers per 1000 people as the most important indicator and the number of rural active health house per 1000 people as the less important indicator. According to TOPSIS, the towns of Ashtian and Shazand ranked the first and last (10th) respectively in access to health services.Conclusion:There are significant inequalities in distribution of health care facilities in Markazi province. We propose that policy makers determine resource allocation priorities according to the degree of development for a balanced and equal distribution of health care facilities.

Objectives: This study has analyzed the policy-making requirements related to basic health insurance package at the national level with a systematic view. Results: All the documents presented since the enactment of universal health insurance in Iran from 1994 to 2017 were included applying Scott method for assuring meaningfulness, authenticity, credibility and representativeness. Then, content analysis was conducted applying MAXQDA10. The legal and policy requirements related to basic health insurance package were summarized into 3 main themes and 11 subthemes. The main themes include three kinds of requirements at three level of Third party insurer, Health care provider and Citizen/population that contains 5 (financing insurance package, organizational structure, tariffing and purchasing the benefit packages and integration of policies and precedents), 4 (determining the necessities, provision of services, rules relating to implementation and covered services) and 2 (expanded coverage of population and insurance premiums) sub themes respectively. According to the results, Iranian policy makers should notice three axes of third party insurers, health providers and population of the country to prepare an appropriate basic benefit package based on local needs for all the people that can access with no financial barriers in order to be sure of achieving UHC.