Successful recruitment and retention strategies for women health volunteers: viewpoints of the volunteers' supervisors and relevant researchers

Hamed Rezakhani Moghaddam, Hamid Allahverdipour, Hossein Matlabi Department of Health Education and Promotion, Faculty of Health Sciences, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran Background: Women health volunteers (WHVs) are a link between people and healthcare workers. Despite their key role in promoting community health, strategies are rarely designed to keep them volunteering. The aim of this research was to find successful strategies to overcome barriers to recruitment and retention of the volunteers in assigned activities.Subjects and methods: A three-round online national Delphi technique was used to ask the opinions of Iranian health volunteers’ supervisors and the relevant researchers. At the first round, the participants were asked ten open-ended questions across four barriers: inadequate capability of the volunteers and trainers, inadequate acceptance of the volunteers, restrictive social norms, and organizational problems. At the second round, with the questionnaire consisting of closed-ended questions, the experts were asked to rank the feasibility of each strategy using a seven-point Likert scale. Items along with the feedback received from the second round were included in the third-round questionnaire. Strategies with a median of 6 or higher and with an interquartile range ≤1 were regarded to be feasible.Results: Consensus was obtained on 100 of the 133 strategies. A mixture of improving group work, implementing motivation tactics, assessing the needs of people/WHVs, reforming policy, monitoring and evaluation of WHVs/trainers, mobilizing the community, empowering WHVs/trainers, rationalizing WHVs/trainers/ people, improving intersectional collaboration, implementing problem-based approaches, allocating proper resources, appropriate recruitment of WHVs, using social networks, and information dissemination were found to be the effective strategies to overcome the barriers to active participation.Conclusion: The highest consensuses among experts were on implementing motivation tactics and mobilizing the community. It seems that community mobilization, incentives, and logistical supplies such as providing prizes and transportation facilities for volunteers are mechanisms that can help retain WHVs and also overcome barriers to their active participation. Keywords: health volunteers, Delphi technique, consensus, community health, retention strategie

From human niche construction to imperial power: long-term trends in ancient Iranian water systems

This article summarizes the outcome of a workshop sponsored by the Durham University Centre for Iranian Cultural Studies, where papers were presented on the entire chronological range of water management systems in Iran from around 8000 years bc until around 1000 ad. The primary aim was to recognize major research questions that could be used to create an agenda for future studies of ancient water use in the country. In the Durham meeting, it appeared that although the small-scale prehistoric systems probably constituted an example of ‘human niche construction’, the later imperial systems did not. Despite the recognition of occasional irrigation systems of third millennium bc date in the Deh Luran plain by Neely and Wright, as well as perhaps in Khuzestan, there appears to be a general dearth of evidence of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age systems in Iran. However, by the first millennium bc there was a considerable increase in the construction of major water management systems, some of which were, at least as far as the associated evidence suggests, constructed by imperial authorities. All agreed, however, that just because a system appeared large in scale, it was not necessarily a result of imperial management. For the subject of qanats it was argued that not only were they usually built by small-scale societies, but also that there may have been multiple centres of origin; one primary centre being a broad zone of south-east Iran, Pakistan and south-east Arabia