Introduction: Evaluation of pharmaceutical systems performance is an essential prerequisite for promoting evidence-based policy-making, improvement in health system performance. This study attempts to evaluate the performance of Iran pharmaceutical system based on the world health organization (WHO)'s indicators, including access, quality, and rational use of medicines. Methods: In this c...

Nursing, personal care, food and cleaning are publicly funded in Ontario's long-term care facilities, but under-staffing usually renders all but the most basic of personal preferences superfluous. This individualization of responsibility for more personalized care has resulted in more families providing more care and opting to hire private, private companion care. With direct payment of compani...

The rapid growth of contemporary social network sites (SNSs) has coincided with an increasing concern over personal privacy. College students and adolescents routinely provide personal information on profiles that can be viewed by large numbers of unknown people and potentially used in harmful ways. SNSs like Facebook and MySpace allow users to control the privacy level of their profile, thus l...

Images convey a broad spectrum of personal information. If such images are shared on social media platforms, this personal information is leaked which conflicts with the privacy of depicted persons. Therefore, we aim for automated approaches to redact such private information and thereby protect privacy of the individual. By conducting a user study we find that obfuscating the image regions rel...

INTRODUCTION Asperger's syndrome is one of the autism spectrum disorders. Affected individuals display considerably impaired capacity for social interaction, unusual special interests, and a tendency towards ritualized behavior. METHODS The etiology, symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of Asperger's syndrome in adulthood are outlined on the basis of a selective literature review via Medline an...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to investigate doctors' and patients' views of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in order to assess why problems in the doctor-IBS patient relationship seem to occur. METHODS A qualitative study was undertaken involving in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using the constant comparative method. Th...

In many countries around the world, including Iran, obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. Doctors have recently taken, or expressed support for, an extreme ‘personal responsibility for health’ policy against obesity: refusing services to obese patients. This policy may initially seem to improve patients’ incentives to fight obesity. But turning access to medical services into a benefit depe...