مطالب

INTRUDUCTION: Staff of medical centers, who are saviors of accident victims, face risks at work that may even lose their lives. Although different criteria have been used in different studies, the performance of medical centers in terms of health, safety, and environment (HSE) management has not been evaluated. Therefore, the extraction, grouping, and prioritization of the HSE management assessment criteria of medical centers were performed in the present study. METHODS: Using the systematic method, following examining the most important methods, the criteria and sub-criteria associated with the HSE management of the medical centers were extracted, grouped and prioritized using the opinions of experts. The entropy method was employed to analyze the criteria. FINDINGDS: Total of 33 criteria and 166 sub-criteria were extracted which from them the criteria of operation control, risk management, and resource management had the highest repetition in the performance assessment methods. Finally, the cases were classified in 13 criteria and 35 sub-criteria, and the criteria of strategic management and compliance with laws and regulations were of the highest importance from the viewpoint of the study experts.

INTRODUCTION: Comprehensive healthcare centers should be able to provide primary healthcare services during disasters; therefore, it is necessary to assess their safety and preparedness to ensure that they can have acceptable functionality in critical situations. In this regard, the present study aimed to evaluate the level of safety and disaster preparedness of comprehensive healthcare centers in Babol, Iran. METHODS: The present descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in 2016 to investigate the safety level and disaster preparedness of 232 comprehensive healthcare centers in Babol, using observation and checklists. The used checklist consisted of three parts, namely functional, structural, and non-structural safety assessment. Finally, the collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. FINDINGS: Based on the data analysis, the studied centers were more prone to weather hazards than other types of disasters. Moreover, the evaluation of the different aspects of the functionality of the centers showed that the best functionality was observed in firefighting, provision of the environmental health services, organization and structure, and provision of infectious disease management services, in that order. The non-structural safety obtained the highest average score (37.49) while the scores of functional and structural safety were 21.76 and 9.27, respectively. CONCLUSION: Based on the results, all the studied comprehensive healthcare centers had a moderate level of structure and functional safety, while no center had a completely desirable level. Therefore, it is recommended to develop proper plans and monitor the comprehensive healthcare centers to eliminate their defects and improve the level of their safety.