Development and Assessment of Respectful Maternity Care Questionnaire in Iran

Background: Disrespectful and undignified care during childbirth has been documented in health facilities all over the world. The purpose of this study was to develop and pretest a new instrument, the Quality of Respectful Maternity Care Questionnaire in Iran (QRMCQI), with an ensured validity and reliability to evaluate and measure Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) in three sections of labor, delivery and post-partum. Methods: This is a study with mixed sequential exploratory design. Here, the questionnaire design is a part of descriptive survey study and consists of five phases implemented in one year. The phases include item or questions generation, face validation, content validity assessment, confirmatory factor analysis and reliability assurance of the questionnaire. The participants were selected from the mothers referring to health care centers affiliated to Iran University of Medical Sciences in five cities after recruitment from hospital for after-care services of delivery. Results: The primary questionnaire was developed, face validity was performed by experts and their comments were implemented. The content validity index (CVI), Kappa index and Content Validity Ratio (CVR) were calculated for each item and they were satisfactory in an acceptable range. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed good fit of the hypothesized model for 453 participants in the interview. Testing showed an acceptable internal consistency and reliability by calculating Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for questions in labor (0.86), in delivery (0.85), and in postpartum care (0.78). Conclusion: We have developed a new instrument as the 59-item QRMCQI for evaluating respectful maternity care in Iran through a rigorous process of item generation and validity-reliability assessment besides confirmatory factor analysis that were in an acceptable range and can be used as a reliable instrument for RMC in Iran

A Mathematical Model for Operating Rooms Planning Under Uncertainty (The case: Ghaem Hospital of Mashhad)

The control and planning of operating rooms have became more and more important for hospital managers. Nowadays, the operating rooms, as key resources, often lead to a great time waste. So, appropriate scheduling of operations in order to increase the efficiency of the operating rooms, are significant research topics in medical care. In this study, a new linear programming model has been developed for the assignment of patients to the operating rooms. Since the duration of surgical procedure is a stochastic parameter, in this paper a two-stage stochastic programming model has been presented in addition the deterministic model. These presented models simultaneously investigate the scheduling of surgeries and allocating them to the surgery rooms. The aim of this study is to minimize the cost of assigning patients to unspecialized rooms and reduce the cost of doctors’ idle time per working shifts by taking into account the constraints. The suggested models were applied for the surgery department of Ghaem hospital of Mashhad and solved by ILOG CPLEX 12.6.1 Microsoft Visual Studio environment. The results show that the deterministic proposed model increases the average efficiency of hospital to 38.275% and the stochastic model increases the average efficiency to 85.32%