ethics

Clinical ethics of health care providers play an important role in shaping women’s childbirth experiences. This study aimed to examine the impact of improving delivery agents' clinical ethics on primiparous mothers' childbirth experiences.

This semi-experimental study involved 120 primiparous mothers at Alavi Hospital in Ardabil. The samples of the first and second groups were selected using convenience and purposeful methods, respectively. In the first phase, the childbirth experience questionnaire (CEQ) was completed for 60 primiparous mothers (first group) enrolled before the delivery agents ethics training workshop. After 4 weeks of the workshop, the second 60 primiparous mothers entered the study. The collected data were analyzed using Spearman and Pearson correlation tests and t-tests (P < 0.05).

The mean score of childbirth experience among the first group was 45.7 ± 8, which increased to 37.6 ± 6.9 in the second group after conducting a training workshop for the delivery agents. There was a significant correlation between the improvements in the clinical ethics of delivery agents and the enhancement of mothers' childbirth experiences (P < 0.001).

Positive childbirth experiences of mothers can be enhanced by improving the clinical ethics of delivery agents.

Peace is a multidimensional concept influenced by various factors. This study aimed to explain the process of peace formation in comprehensive health services.

Material: 

This qualitative study was conducted using a grounded theory approach to answer the question: “How is peace formed in comprehensive health networks?”. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 patients and staff members of comprehensive health networks. Purposeful sampling was used initially, followed by theoretical sampling. Data were analyzed using the Strauss and Corbin approach (1998).

The peace formation process in a comprehensive health network included 5 main categories and 8 sub-categories. The main categories were threats, opportunities, barriers to organizational productivity, strategies, and consequences. Threats included subcategories of poor performance management and organizational challenges. Opportunities included teamwork, cooperation, organizational freedom, inner peace, trust, and authority. Barriers to organizational productivity included deviant behaviors and negative emotions within the organization. Strategies included effective management and adherence to professional ethics. The consequence included two subcategories, social capital and organizational development.

Comprehensive health networks encounter organizational challenges and poor performance management in establishing peace, as well as barriers to organizational productivity. Therefore, policymakers and managers should implement effective measures and strategies to address these challenges.

Since medical professionalism is based on ethics, the observance of ethical principles in its education plays a significant role in forming professional and moral values ​​in medical students. This study aims to determine the importance of ethics in education and the degree of compliance with ethical principles in Zahedan University of Medical Sciences (ZUMS) from the perspective of internship students.

In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 97 internship students of ZUMS in 2022 participated. The data collection tools were a demographic form and a standardized questionnaire developed by Farahbakhsh et al., for measuring the importance of and degree of compliance with ethical principles. Data analysis was done in SPSS v.21 software using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Overall, the importance of ethics in medical education was 88.22%, and the overall level of compliance with ethics in medical education was 68.58%. The results of the Mann-Whitney U test showed no significant difference in the overall importance of ethics and overall compliance with ethics in terms of age, gender, place of residence, work experience, and the history of participating in ethics workshops.

Ethics in medical education is very important from the perspective of ZUMS students. The causes and factors affecting this perception regarding the observance of ethical standards in education should be identified to help the effectiveness of education and strengthen moral values ​​in medical education.

 Considering that university professors are one of the main groups of researchers and as students tend to be novices in this regard, it is of particular importance to examine their perspective and compliance with ethics in research. Therefore, this study was conducted with the aim of investigating the perspectives of the students and the faculty members of Gonabad University of Medical Sciences towards the inhibitors and the facilitators of ethical compliance in research in 2019.

 In this cross-sectional descriptive study, 66 faculty members and 144 students of Gonabad University of Medical Sciences were selected through census and stratified random sampling, respectively. The research tools included a demographic information form as well as the questionnaire of ethical codes and inhibitors and facilitators of ethical compliance in research. The data were analyzed through SPSS version 18, using descriptive and analytical statistics. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to investigate the compliance of the data with the normal distribution. The chi-square test was used in data analysis, with a P-value<0/05.

Ethical Considerations: 

In all the stages of writing the present research, while respecting the originality of the texts, honesty and trustworthiness has been observed.

 Sixty-six participants (31.5%) were faculty members and 144 of them (68.5%) were students.  The most important inhibitor of ethical compliance in research from the students' point of view (84%), in the stage of choosing the topic, was the researcher’s insufficient awareness of ethics in research. From the faculty members' point of view (50%), the most important inhibitor of ethical compliance in research in the stage of reviewing the existing documents was the lack of skill in reviewing the existing documents including search skills. The most important facilitator of ethical compliance in research was placing more emphasis on the issue of ethics in research while presenting the course of research methods, from the faculty members' point of view (68%) and holding educational workshops on professional and research ethics, from students' point of view (37.5%). The results regarding the agreement to use ethical codes in research from the perspectives of the students and the professors in the three stages of choosing the research topic and stating the problem, reviewing the available documents and analyzing and reporting and publishing the results of statistical differences, showed the significance levels of P<0.001, P=0.007 and P=0.01, respectively.

 Despite the good state of ethical compliance and the appropriate performance of the ethics committee in research, there are still obstacles on the way to reaching better ethical compliance. The need to hold periodic training workshops, monitor research projects closely and provide the necessary infrastructure is felt.

 Research ethics effectively influences the quality of research. Since a significant portion of research is conducted by faculty members and students, it is essential that academic institutions uphold scientific and ethical research standards. This study aimed to assess the extent to which research ethics is adhered to by medical faculty members and students.

 This descriptive-analytical study was carried out during the 2022-23 academic year on 130 medical students and 98 faculty members at Abadan University of Medical Sciences. Students were selected through simple random sampling, while faculty members were included through the census method. Data were collected using demographic and research ethics questionnaires and then analyzed using SPSS 18. Statistical tests, including the independent t-test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation, were applied at a significance level of Lees than P<0.05.

Ethical Considerations: 

The study was conducted and published in full compliance with ethical principles.

 The overall research ethics score and all of its dimensions, except for the justice dimension, were higher among faculty members (148) compared to students (101). There was a significant and direct correlation between the research ethics scores of faculty members and students, observed across all evaluated dimensions (P<0.001). Additionally, significant correlations were found between faculty members and students in the dimensions of professional competence (r=0.762, P<0.001), commitment to truth-seeking (r=0.767, P<0.001), benefit (r=0.786, P<0.001), respect for respondents (r=0.769, P<0.004), research activities (r=0.803, P<0.001), justice (r=0.730, P<0.001) and the overall research ethics score (r=0.804, P<0.001).

 The adherence to research ethics was higher among faculty members compared to students; however, the score among faculty members was still average. Hence, it is recommended that greater emphasis be placed on adhering to research ethics principles as a vital and essential component of research, with the aim of enhancing the quality of knowledge production and dissemination.

Dear Editor,Artificial Intelligence (AI) is utilized for information management and forecast. However, the ethical challenges of using artificial intelligence should not be disregarded. Disrupting social justice, bias in programs, transparency and explainability, data safety, respect for human dignity and informed consent, error, and compensation are among the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence. Ethical auditing, creating ethical policies, making artificial intelligence accessible to all societies, and guaranteeing the global implementation of data protection and their implementation are among the appropriate ways to deal with the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence.

 The Holy Quran has emphasized a lot on ethics and the issue of paying attention to ethics in political decision-making is a very important issue in the political governance of Islam. In such a way that the ultimate goal in politics and governance is to achieve the happiness of the Islamic Ummah, not to achieve domination and power. At the beginning of the Umayyad rule, the grab of power to secure personal and tribal interests became the goal of the rulers' actions and Mu'awiya's actions based on the absence of a two-way relationship between politics and ethics became the model of the caliphs after him. In this way, Umayyad politics under the leadership of Mu'awiyah was a separation between the two categories of politics and ethics. The problem of the present research is to investigate the performance of Muawiyah in relation to the separation of ethics and politics and to analyze the examples of violations of ethics in his policies as the founder of the Umayyad government in the history of Islam. In this regard, we will have a look at the theory of Malik Ben Nabi in the political ethics of the Umayyad era in order to clarify how Muawiya's behavior in the field of action and opinion led to the decline of Islamic governance and was able to regress political ethics in Islamic governance.

 This research is a review, descriptive and analytical study and its data has been provided by collecting research slips from library sources.

Ethical Considerations:

 The principles of honesty and trustworthiness have been observed in the entire research process.

 During the Umayyad dynasty period, especially the period of Muawiya's rule, due to the priority of power over happiness, a constructive relationship between ethics and politics was not established; Rather, in order to gain power, methods contrary to the approach of ethics and politics were adopted.

 Muawiya and the Umayyad government in general in the field of Islamic civilization by using anti-ethical methods such as Creating terror, poisoning and terror, lying, falsifying hadith and cultural activities and reproduction of Jahili ideas, caused a negative and inconsistent relationship between ethics and politics in the field of governance.

 Paying attention to environmental cultures and acting based on them is one of the main success indicators of human resources management. This is particularly important for education, given its wide scope and goals, as it is one of the main requirements for creating national unity. Therefore, the current research has been carried out with the aim of identifying and investigating the dimensions and ethical components of management in multicultural schools.

 The approach of the current research was qualitative and its method was meta-composite. The research community included all the articles published in the last decade (2013-23) in the field of ethical indicators in the management of schools in areas with subcultures, from which 25 titles were selected as samples based on thematic content monitoring. Research data were collected by qualitative analysis of the studied documents.

Ethical Considerations: 

In writing the article, ethical aspects including preserving the authenticity of the texts, honesty and trustworthiness have been observed.

 By analyzing the data, the ethical indicators of management in schools in areas with subcultures were classified into 4 dimensions, 13 factors, and 67 categories. These dimensions include: individual-personality components (including the attitude of cultural ethics, knowledge of cultural ethics), social components (communication skills, cultural constructivism and intercultural ethics), professional-specialist components (managing diversity in human resources, specialized professional development, professional commitment and responsibility), and leadership-managerial components (paying attention to multicultural learning, intercultural conflict management, evolution towards pluralism).

 According to the findings, it can be concluded that paying attention to personality and empowering characteristics in line with the ethical management of human resources and understanding cultural diversity and the ability to make the school atmosphere collaborative helps to create an ethical environment in multicultural schools.