Evaluating health promotion standards at the Farshchian heart center of Hamadan, Iran

ABSTRACT

Objective

Farshchian Heart Center is the fifth health-promoting hospital and the first center of its type in Western Iran that officially joined the International Network of Health Promoting Hospitals and Health Services (HPH) in 2016. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the health promotion standards at this center in 2018.

Methods

We conducted this cross-sectional study at Farshchian Heart Center of Hamadan. The main data collection instruments included questionnaires obtained from indicators of five different main standards of health-promoting hospitals developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) which were evaluated from three different perspectives: Management staff, hospital employees, and patients. The data were analyzed by SPSS version 21 software.

Results

We evaluated 111 hospital employees, 109 patients, and 6 management staff. Nurses (46.8%) comprised the majority of the hospital staff respondents. Less than half (42.3%) of the hospital staff expressed awareness of hospital health promotion policies; however, only 13.5% had attended various health promotion programs. Only 51.4% of patients knew about the hospital health promotion policies and 17.4% of them participated in relevant programs. The mean score for patient satisfaction with the hospital health promotion programs according to the visual analogue scale (VAS, range: 0–10) was 7.16 ± 2.45, which was significantly higher in outpatients (8.16 ± 1.85) compared to inpatients (6.44 ± 2.59, p = 0.001). Two thirds (66.7%) of the management staff expressed awareness of implementation of these programs.

Conclusion

The results of this study demonstrated that health promotion policies based on WHO standards were not well-recognized among patients, hospital employees, and management staff in Farshchian Heart Center of Hamadan, Iran.

KEYWORDS:

• Health Promotion
• hospitals
• heart
• Hamadan

Acknowledgments

We express our appreciation to all hospital staff, patients, leadership and management personnel who sincerely and patiently cooperated with us throughout this study.

Declaration of interest

The contents of the paper and the opinions expressed within are those of the authors, and it was the decision of the authors to submit the manuscript for publication.

Reviewer’s disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.