Capacity building for priority setting in Farrokhshahr population

Priority setting is an important process for research management in all sections, especially in health section. Priority setting would be more valuable for limited founds allocation. Priority setting will help all countries in planning research programs of health section, collection and allocation of research resources and strengthening native research capacities. Besides the researchers, the stakeholders, who should participate in priority setting, will be affected from the research results. In this study, the priority setting following needs assessment in Farrokhshahr city of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province of Iran has been performed.

This was a community based participatory research which was performed by Farrokhshahr development team and supervised by Shahrekord university of medical sciences deputy for research affairs. At the first, data collected from need assessment survey using rapid appraisal method was classified. Then considering factors such as living conditions, environmental factors, institutions’ structures and recognizing facilitating factors priority setting was carried out. Two dimensional matrix, priority diagram and table of analyzing problems were used for priority setting.

In this study 40 problems of Farrokhshahr community in 9 categories consisted of elderly, young, security, sport, women, health and psychological problems were subjected to priority setting using two-dimensional matrix. In this process, 20 priorities with the most frequency in two-dimensional matrix were achieved. Then every priority was analyzed to recognize the measures to overcome the problem.

Considering limited resources in the developing countries, priority setting with participation of people is a solution and this process cause’s capacity building in the community.