Health promoting hospitals in Iran: A review of the current status, challenges, and future prospects

Health promoting hospitals (HPHs), in addition to their routine diagnosis and treatment services, concentrate on health enhancement and disease prevention. This study was conducted to systematically review studies conducted in the field of health promoting hospitals (HPH) in Iran to achieve HPH standards.

Electronic search was conducted from October to February 2016 in Persian and English databases. Search was done IranMedex, SID, ISI Web of Knowledge, ScienceDirect, PubMed, and Google Scholar with the following keywords: Health promotion hospital (s), health promoting hospital (s), health promotion hospitals, HPH, and Iran. Based on inclusion and exclusion criteria and the aim of the study, 10 studies were selected to be reviewed.

The results showed that HPH standards in studied hospitals were very poor in overall standard and that the standard of management policy had the lowest mean. Studies conducted in the order modeling HPH in Iran showed that factors of patient empowerment and society had the greatest impact and needs assessment had the lowest impact. The results of interventional studies were reviewed in this study and it was found that implementing standards of HPH and educational interventions increase the standard of HPH.

The review of the HPH studied indicated that the most important challenge in achieving the standards of health promotion hospitals is Iran’s hospital policy, which is more treatment-oriented.