Journal of School of Public Health and

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Background and Aim: Puberty is a critical period in a woman's life. An important step in strategies designed to promote family and community health is determination of girls' health priorities and needs assessment at puberty. This study aims to illustrate the efficiency of need assessment approach in exploring and comparing the viewpoints of mothers, teachers and adolescent girls on girls' pubertal health in the context of the school. The findings would help plan better programs aiming at changing the heatlh behaviour of girls.
Materials and Methods: In this qualitative study 12 guidance school girls, 12 mothers and 7 teachers from District 6, Tehran were selected to participate in focus group discussions to prepare a semi-structured questionnaire. The content analysis method was used to analyze the results of discussions with the participants and complete the final questionnaire.
Results: The findings reveal the efficiency of the need assessment approach as follows: a wide discrepancy in viewpoints of the three study groups was identified in terms of pubertal health priorities, health needs of the girls, and pubertal health educational priorities. In addition, the results show a lack of a notion of comprehensive sex health education in the school.
Conclusion: The findings indicate that the need assessment approach is a useful way to plan and implement appropriate health education programs for adolescent girls.

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Background and Aim: Priority setting is one of the most important issues in health research systems. No national health system can afford to finance all research projects proposed by researchers, especially in developing countries. Therefore, we decided to set the main national health research priorities in Iran using the Essential National Health Research (ENHR) method.

Materials and Methods: All of the Iranian universities of medical sciences and other stakeholders collaborated in this study. The methodology for research priority setting was based on needs assessment and ENHR. 

Results: The total number of research priorities gathered from universities of medical sciences was 6723. The proportions of topics related to basic science, applied and development subjects were 17%, 78% and 5%, respectively. Further analysis of the data showed that almost half (46.3%) of the research priorities were descriptive, 36.0% analytical, and 17.6% interventional. The research priorities were divided into 9 main areas, namely, communicable diseases, noncommunicable diseases, health system research, pharmaceutical sciences and industrial pharmacy, basic science, traditional and herbal medicine, nutrition, environmental health, and dentistry.

Conclusion: Up to now the common procedure for research priority setting has been, with a top-to-bottom approach, managed by a limited number of researchers and experts, while in the method presented in this paper a bottom-to-top approach is used, which is more effective.