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Background: Postoperative pain and anxiety are unpleasant situations that are often experienced by women undergoing cesarean section. Since the routine methods of pain relief after surgery is still inadequate, the need for complementary treatments is felt. Foot Reflexology (FR) and Auricular Acupressure (AA) are two of the most popular and safe procedures of complementary and alternative medicine therapies. So, this study aimed to determine and compare the effectiveness of reflexology and AA on postoperative pain and anxiety., Materials and Methods: This three-group randomized clinical trial study was performed on 101 pregnant women, admitted to Mashhad Omolbanin hospital, for a cesarean section, in 2015. In the intervention groups, 2-3 h after the operation, AA or FR was performed for 20 min. Routine care was provided for the control group. Pain and anxiety were evaluated by VAS and Spielberger anxiety questionnaire before and 1 and 2 h after the intervention., Results: The results showed that immediately after the intervention, pain intensity was significantly lower in both AA and FR groups ( P < 0.001) compared with the control group. In addition, 2 h after the interventions, pain intensity was significantly lower in the AA group compared with the control group ( P = 0.006). However, no significant differences were observed between the FR and the control groups ( P = 0.095). In addition, 1 and 2 h after the intervention, anxiety was significantly different between the three groups ( P = 0.033 and P = 0.018), respectively. The results of the Tukey test showed that this difference was only between FR and control groups ( P = 0.025 and P = 0.017), respectively., Conclusion: AA is more effective in reducing post-cesarean pain while FR effectively reduces post-cesarean anxiety. Therefore, these complementary medicine treatments as easy and noninvasive methods are recommended to be used during labor for improving maternal outcomes., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright: © 2024 Journal of Education and Health Promotion.)

The quality of emergency services is one of the indicators describing the health status of countries. Moreover, the specialization of services and targeted response to any accident or disease has been the priority of pre-hospital emergency operations in some leading countries. This study aimed to compare the special services provided in the emergency department of several selected countries. This was a comparative study that was done in Isfahan in 2022. Data were collected by reviewing the literature provided by libraries and emergency websites of selected countries. We selected countries based on the accessibility of information in two groups of developed countries and countries with the same income and population as Iran including Germany, France, The United States, Australia, Britain, Malaysia, and Turkey. Data were classified and compared based on staff, vehicles, and specialized services. Emergency staffs in most countries were of different skill and training levels. Ambulances varied in equipment types in various land, air, and sea forms and dimensions. Developed countries had more modern ambulances and equipment. France and Germany were operating more especially. Specialized teams are dispatched only in the United States and Germany. Existing studies have shown the adequacy and effectiveness of these teams in reducing complications and mortality and improving the prognosis of patients. The use of specialized teams appropriate to each emergency based on the specific and targeted response is effective in improving the prognosis of patients. The results of this study are suggested to beneficiaries to improve the quality of emergency care and reduce complications and potential causalities., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright: © 2023 Journal of Education and Health Promotion.)

Background: The low prevalence of rare diseases has caused the need for studies in this field to be neglected. Regardless of the prevalence of rare diseases, many people around the world have to live with the medical, psychological, and social consequences of their condition. Individuals with rare diseases may face challenges that are different from those experienced in more common medical conditions. The life experiences of patients with rare diseases have not been sufficiently investigated. The purpose of this study was to discover the meaning of living as a person with a rare disease., Materials and Methods: This interpretative phenomenological study was conducted in 2021-2022 on 10 patients with one of the rare diseases (registered in the Atlas of Rare Diseases of Iran). Based on purposeful sampling, people with rare diseases living in Mazandaran, Golestan, and Tehran provinces were invited to participate in the study. Data collection was done using open and semi-structured interviews. The research question was exploring understanding the experience and meaning of life as a person with a rare disease. Van Manen's interpretive phenomenological approach was used to analyze the data, and the criteria of validity, transferability, and verifiability were used to ensure the trustworthiness of the research., Results: The five main themes "permanent suffering, such as a bird in a cage, rejection, immersion in the whirlpool of thoughts, losing the feeling of life", and 10 sub-themes "nightmare, giving up, deprivation, limitation, worthlessness, being stigmatized, dark vision, confusion, continuous regret, and inferiority feeling" were extracted., Conclusion: The results of this study show that the suffering of the disease casts a shadow on all aspects of a patient's life with a rare disease. The effects of illness, disability, limitations, and exclusions had created a human being in a cage, whose right to live like others has been denied., Competing Interests: There is no conflict of interest., (Copyright: © 2023 Journal of Education and Health Promotion.)

Background: The awareness of the elderly needs and assisting requirement should be added to education and preparedness disaster plans. In this study, we want to reach a comprehensive training program considering goals, objectives, time, budgeting, target group, syllabus, educational strategy, and teaching methods for CBOs interested and being served elders in disasters., Methods and Materials: This qualitative study has been done via interviews with key informants in CBHOs and NGOs and the ministry of health agents in Iran. Besides, content analysis of the documents and instructions provided by the government to direct partnerships with NGOs was reviewed, and focus discussion group to conduct a deductive content analysis research. All data were analyzed with MAXQDA 18., Results: Content analysis reached two main goals and seven objectives. The first goal refers to the fact that an educational program should direct not only subjects concerning disasters' effects on the aging population, but also discerning elders' different needs, giving priority to the supply of the basic needs of elders, and looking ahead the physical and mental problems of the elders. The second goal refers to relief skills that CBHOs stakeholders need to obtain for serving elders in a disaster through participating in various exercises., Conclusions: The results can guide community-based stakeholders in considering all the needs of the elderly during disasters and teaching all the syllabus of this research would reduce the adverse effects of disasters on the elderly., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright: © 2023 Journal of Education and Health Promotion.)

Background: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education set up a 24-h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people's worries and anxieties, create composure, increase people's trust, and answer their questions. This qualitative study aimed to identify the challenges of COVID-19-related-information among people in point of experts' views., Materials and Methods: This qualitative study was conducted to collect the opinions of experts on the identification of the Information challenges of COVID-19 during March-June 2020. The research population included all health professionals and experts. The sampling method was initially purposive and continued to saturate the data as snowball technique. In this study, 19 participants were interviewed. The data were collected using a semi-structured interview. After collecting the data, the audio files of the interviews were written down to extract their external and internal elements. MAXQDA version 12 software was used to organize qualitative analysis and coding data., Results: The results of this study involved eight themes, i.e., lack of planning, lack of social trust in government, lack of COVID-19-integrated scientific authority in the country, conflicts of interest, lack of integrated information sources, distracting public attention, infodemic, and poor information quality, classified into 16 categories., Conclusions: The main information challenges that people in Iran faced included the lack of a scientific reference source to access accurate information, the existence of a large volume of information in virtual networks, and a huge volume of statistics from various information channels that caused confusion among people., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright: © 2021 Journal of Education and Health Promotion.)

Objectives: This study discussed about challenges and opportunities of institutional accreditation in Iranian medical universities. The lesson learned of the first round of the accreditation would direct initiatives and solutions for future accreditation., Methodology: This research is a qualitative content analysis research that studied the experience of the survey visit teams. Semistructured interviews with a purposive sampling approach were done to reach data saturation. Constant comparative method was used to analyze the data., Results: The emergent themes were incompatible scheduling with accreditation workload, accreditation sustainability, the weakness of the survey instrument, advantage of the survey instrument, the quality of evaluators' survey, the opportunity of progress for universities, accreditation perspective, defendable cost opportunity, perceived injustice, and the leading strategies. In this study, the relationship between categories and themes was shown with a systematic approach., Conclusion: In medical education systems, it is necessary to continue the research and development studies using the findings in each accreditation period to achieve the prospect of international accreditation., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts of interest., (Copyright: © 2020 Journal of Education and Health Promotion.)

Introduction: The quality of communication skills of health care providers has a significant impact on patient treatment consequences., Aims: The present research has been conducted to check the relationship of communication skills on the rate of patients' satisfaction in the clinics of one of the hospitals in Isfahan., Settings and Design: The checking list was completed by the researcher in the clinics by using the comments of patients or their relatives. Sampling was performed by using the regular random sampling method., Materials and Methods: This research was a descriptive-analytical study. The used tool was a standard checking list for evaluating the patients' satisfaction and also the researcher-made checking list for the measurement of effective communication skills., Statistical Analysis: The researcher-made checking list for the measurement of effective communication skills was confirmed by the experts with the face validity, structure, content, and reliability (α =87%). After visiting the patient by the physician, the mentioned list was filled by using the patients' comments, and the collected data was analyzed by SPSS software version 16 with calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient and α2., Results: The study showed that there was a significant relationship between the application of communication skills in the five areas of verbal, body language, effective communicating, establishment, patient privacy and patient participation, except for eye communication of the physician with patients' satisfaction (P < 0.05)., Conclusion: Using the communication skills by physicians is associated with patients' satisfaction, and it is the cause of increasing the acceptance of the physician by the patient. Therefore, it is suggested that the opportunity to improve the communication skills should be provided in addition to clinical skills in continuing education programs for the medical community.