Acta medica Iranica
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Acta medica Iranica · Jan 2014
Investigating the effect of clinical governess approach on patients' length of stay in emergency department: an action research study.
Over the past decade, clinical governance approach with aims to improve the quality of health services has been proposed in Iran. Considering the obvious problems especially patients' length of stay (LOS) in the emergency departments (EDs); the present study has been carried out with the purpose of Investigating the effect of clinical governess approach on patients' LOS in the one of the largest medical centers in the country. After the problem was specified by the 17 interviews with employees and managers of the ED; the emergency clinical governance committee was formed by two academic researchers and seven ED staff (key participants) that had the most involvement with the subject of study. ⋯ Make regular patients visits by medical groups especially orthopedists and neurologists; Decision making about patients situation by emergency physicians and transferring patients to the relevant units by bed managers; Refusing to admit elective patients during overcrowding times; to regulate the list of patients requiring ICU by anesthesiologists. Prolonged LOS can be due to various causes and a team approach, which is one of the requirements of clinical governance approach, is needed to manage it. The results showed that the multidisciplinary team could make positive changes and reduce LOS in emergency setting.
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Given the importance of patient's rights in healthcare, special attention has been given to the concept of patient's rights by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education in Iran. Iranian patient's rights charter has been compiled with a novel and comprehensive approach. This charter aims to elucidate rights of recipients of health services as well as observing ethical standards in medicine. ⋯ The developed charter was adopted by the Ministry of Health in December 2009. Iranian patient's rights charter has been formulated in the framework of 5 chapters and 37 articles including vision and an explanatory note. The five chapters concern right to receiving appropriate services, right to access desired and enough information, right to choose and decide freely about receiving healthcare, right to privacy and confidentiality, and finally right to access an efficient system of dealing with complaints which have been explained in 14, 9, 7, 4 and 3 articles, respectively. The paper concludes that, adopting the patient's rights charter is a valuable measure to meet patient's rights; however, a serious challenge is how to implement and acculturate observing patient's rights in practice in our healthcare system in Iran.
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Acta medica Iranica · Jan 2014
The trend of indexed papers in PubMed covering different aspects of self-immolation.
Self-immolation is a fatal and devastating method of committing suicide used around the world. The chief aim of the present article is to look at the trend of indexed papers in PubMed covering different aspects of self-immolation. PubMed search engine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) was searched by using six keywords i.e. "self-immolation", "self-inflicted burn", "self-burning", "self-incineration", "suicidal burns" and "suicide by burning". ⋯ Three journals i.e. Burns, Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation and Journal of Forensic Sciences hosted for more than 37% of all those indexed articles. However, given the increasing trend of self-immolation still more studies are needed to shed light on the diverse aspects of this appalling human behavior.