BACKGROUND Recently, quality is a serious concern in development of organizations. There are various indicators to assess quality and the purpose of this study was to identify the main indicators for quality measurement of Iranian health centers. METHODS This qualitative study was conducted in three stages: first, review of the literature was performed to identify different indicators for qua...

The energy consumption associated with domestic hot water supply services correspond to a significant portion of the total energy consumption of the urban water cycle. The objective of this study is to analyse the performance of domestic water heaters in the three largest cities of Australia (i.e. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane). The performance of systems was investigated undertaking a multi-p...

OBJECTIVES Holistic sexuality education (HSE) is a new concept in sexuality education (SE). Since it differs from other types of SE in a number of important respects, strategies developed for the evaluation of the latter are not necessarily applicable to HSE. In this paper the authors provide a basis for discussion on how to evaluate HSE. METHODS First, the international literature on evaluat...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) often causes catastrophic economic effects on both the individual suffering the disease and their households. A number of studies have analyzed patient and household expenditure on TB care, but there does not appear to be any that have assessed the incidence, intensity and determinants of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) relating to TB care in China. That will ...

BACKGROUND Since 2007, integrated care of acute malnutrition has been promoted in Niger, a country affected by high burden of disease. This policy change aimed at strengthening capacity and ownership to manage the condition. Integration was neither defined nor planned but assumed to have been achieved. This paper studied the level and progress of integration of acute malnutrition interventions ...

BACKGROUND Accurate measurement of the duration of exclusive breastfeeding is complicated by factors related to definitions, timing, duration of recall, methods of analysis, and sample biases. Clearly prospective methods are likely to be more accurate but are too expensive to use in most large-scale surveys. Internationally, most surveys use a point-in-time or current status measurement (usuall...

This viewpoint paper explores the potential of genomics technology to provide accurate, rapid, and cost efficient observations of the marine environment. The use of such approaches in next generation marine monitoring programs will help achieve the goals of marine legislation implemented world-wide. Genomic methods can yield faster results from monitoring, easier and more reliable taxonomic ide...

BACKGROUND: Health disparities are a growing concern. Recently, we conducted a practice-based trial to help primary care physicians improve adherence with 21 quality indicators relevant to the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease and stroke. Although the primary concern in that study was whether patients in intervention practices outperformed those in control practices, we...

an important problem in performance evaluations of irrigation systems is the difficulty of the determining share of structural and operational elements and determining improvement solutions. in most studies, the combined impact of structural and operational elements on the performance of irrigation systems is assessed. some researchers try to separate the effects of structural and operational e...

the purpose of this study is estimation of daily value at risk (var) for total index of tehran stock exchange using parametric, nonparametric and semi-parametric approaches. conditional and unconditional coverage backtesting are used for evaluating the accuracy of calculated var and also to compare the performance of mentioned approaches. in most cases, based on backtesting statistics results, ...