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Background: Process of discharging patients affects patient’s satisfaction .This is one of the serious challenges that hospital managers face. This study is aimed to determine the average waiting time of patient discharge process and identify influential factors of this process in Imam Reza Hospital in Mashhad in the year of 2014.

Materials & Methods: This is a cross-sectional survey in which waiting time of patients who had discharged from clinical wards of the Imam Reza hospital in Mashhad had been studied. 455 of patients had been selected as samples. The amount of  time spent during discharge in six different departments  such as inside each ward, from each ward to the medical records unit, inside the medical records unit, from medical records unit to  accounting department , during cost calculation and also from  cost accounting to cost payment unit) had been determined by using stop-watch method. The data had been analyzed by descriptive and analytical statistics in significant level of 0.05  using SPSS16.

Results: Results showed that waiting time was 504.26± 362.96 Minutes. Patients spent most and least proportion of their waiting time in ENT and Burns wards during discharge.

Conclusion:   As noticeable number of minutes spent inside wards and cost payment unit by patients, calls for corrective interventions such as changing visit time and predicting schedules for sending medical record to accounting department could  reduce waiting time.

Background: Priority setting and resource allocation are assumed to be the most important issues of health-sector and fairness thereof requires considering various criteria. This study was performed to identify the criteria used for priority setting and resource allocation in the world health systems through comprehensive review.
 
Materials and Methods: Cochrane, PubMed and SCOPUS database were searched systematically from Jan.1,2005 to Oct.10,2016. The English articles with codified and specified qualitative and quantitative criteria in the resource allocation context in health sector were included in the study. The obtained data were synthetized thematically.
 
Results: Overall, 9162 papers were extracted. At the beginning of review of the included articles, 9089 papers were removed due to duplication and also based on the title. The abstracts of the remained papers were reviewed and 17 papers were removed. Full text of 59 remained papers were reviewed and based on matching with the inclusion criteria, 34 other papers were removed, too, and ultimately 25 papers were included in the final phase of the study. Extracted criteria were categorized into four dimentions based on economic, management, structural and contextual, out of which the most frequent ones were related to cost, health system goals, local capacity and disease status, respectively.
 

Conclusion: In this study, the most important criteria used by policy makers and decision makers of health system in the world were extracted for priority setting and resource allocation. The results indicated that in the world, priority setting and resource allocation in the health system is made mainly based on criteria such as cost-effectiveness, disease status, equity/equality and the need.