Prioritization of Environmental Health Programs in Kashan from the Society’s Perspective in Comparison with the Perspective of Other Involved Groups

Abstract

Introduction and Objectives:The necessity of responding to the increasing welfare, physical, mental, social, and spiritual demands of people in one hand. Therefore, this study aims to prioritize the environmental health programs in Kashan from the Society's perspective and compare it with the priorities of other involved groups.Methodology: This is a cross sectional study which is carried out qualitatively and quantitatively in August and September, 2016. Some surveys are done with higher than 18 years old citizens of Kashan as a sample. This study has 727 participants, including 560 random samples from those people who are covered by 15 urban health care centers, environmental health experts (50), faculty members of Kashan Health School (14), city managers (29), and Non-Governmental Organization members (NGO) (74). The study tools are self-regulation questionnaires with 74 questions. SPSS 16 software along with Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test, Repeated Measure, Mann-Whitney Test, and Kruskal-Wallis Test are used for data analysis and binary comparisons. Results:The first priority of the society is "health control of hospitals, clinics and health care centers" with the mean score of 4.47. The comparison of perspective of under study groups on 15 programs indicated that there is no significant difference between all groups for 13 programs (PV >0.05). Conclusion:Since there are many adjacent ideas regarding environmental health in Kashan between different groups, all the programs should be taken into consideration. Moreover, society's perspective about environmental health prioritization can be relied on.