Journal of School of Public Health and

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Background and Aim: Anemia is an important public health problem in Iran. The most prevalent type (50%) is iron-deficiency anemia. Flour fortification with iron and folic acid is one of the main strategies usually adopted to combat anemia. Two pilot projects were conducted in 2 Iranian provinces: the first one in Bushehr in 2001 and the second one in Golestan in 2007. The present study was conducted in January 2009 to evaluate the process and determine the effectiveness of the flour fortification pilot project in the 2 provinces.

Materials and Methods: To evaluate the effectiveness of the project, blood hemoglobin and ferritin levels were measured in a sample population of child-bearing women aged 15-49 years in Bushehr Province (n=600) and Golestan Province (n=625), selected by multi-stage sampling before and after the intervention. For process evaluation, the iron content in samples of flour and bread made from the flour were measured in a descriptive study.

Results: We found similar trends in the indicators of anemia/iron deficiency among the women in Bushehr and Golestan provinces. The flour fortification project appears to have had beneficial effects on the serum ferritin levels (low levels indicate iron deficiency) in both provinces. The prevalence of iron deficiency decreased from 22.2% to 15.7% (p<0.002) and from 26.7% to 14.6% (p<0.001), in Bushehr and Golestan, respectively. However, the prevalence of anemia was significantly higher after intervention in Golestan (p<0.001). Further analysis of the data also revealed that the intervention did not have any statistically significant effect on the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia in either province. The coverages of fortified flour and bread were 90% and 98.7% in Bushehr and 94.1% and 95% in Golestan, respectively.

Conclusion: The flour fortification pilot project in Iran resulted in reducing prevalence of iron deficiency and improving body iron reserves in women, but it had no effect on anemia prevalence. It can be concluded that in circumstances where iron deficiency is not a major cause of anemia, interventions such as flour fortification with iron alone will not produce any significant effect.

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Background and Aim: Nowadays, in health promotion and disease prevention great emphasis is put on participatory community-based approaches. These approaches are considered as the main strategy of health promotion by using multiple interventions. Community assessment is a participatory research approach in which problems prioritization and resource distribution are done using information collected in a region aiming at promoting health of the community.

Materials and Methods: In this applied research community assessment was made in the Chahestaniha region in the City of BandarAbbas with the objective of identifying and prioritizing the main problems. The assessment consisted of eight phases, namely, the formation of a community assessment team, Primary and secondary data collection, data analysis and interpretation, combining district-level health statistics with community assessment data, reporting to the community, prioritizing health problems, and prepared a community assessment document.  In the eighth phase, after considering all risk factors that cause high prevalence of Children head lice, the action plan was designed and implemented to solve the problems.

Results: The Chahestaniha community assessment led to identifying 52 problems. The priority problems were classified. High prevalence of lice on children’s head was chosen as the top major problem to be solved, an action plan for solving it was developed and implemented.

Conclusion: The full cycle of community assessment methodology can be applied, with only some small changes, in most communities with different sizes, cultures, traditions and social habits. The method can obtain participation of the people in conducting the study and implementing interventions.

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Background and Aim: Along with the expansion of health systems, the importance of primary health care as the basis of an efficient health system is more evident and the quality of the provided services at this level becomes more important. In this way, the present study attempts to collect patterns used to improve the quality of primary health care.
Materials and Methods: The present study is a systematic review. The advanced search was done in the Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, PubMed, Cochrane, SID, MagIran, IranDoc, and Google Scholar databases in title, abstracts and keywords fields. Inclusion criteria include a comprehensive attitude, focus on primary health services, English or Persian language, published between 2006 and 2018. Exclusion criteria include studies that focus outside of primary health care. The quality of the studies was evaluated using the JBI checklist. Two independent researchers conducted the task of selecting studies, extracting data and evaluating the quality of studies, and disagreement cases were resolved by the third researcher.
Results: After screening and reviewing the criteria for the entry of 10095 studies, 11 studies were finally included. The quality of the four studies was evaluated average and the rest of the quality was high. Two studies have provided patterns for improving the quality of primary health care, three evaluated the effectiveness of quality improvement tools, and five presented conceptual frameworks.
Conclusion: A total of eight types of systems extracted to assess and improve the quality of primary health services. Studies on primary health care have been used at various levels of personal, professional, practical and national policy, and have developed models, tools and frameworks that each of them can be used separately or combined for different situations with regard to the limitations and facilities mentioned and improve health outcomes.