title: The effect of quality circles on job satisfaction and quality of work-life of staff in emergency medical services.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Quality circles, as a participatory management technique, offer one alternative for dealing with frustration and discontent of today's workers. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of implementation of quality circles on nurses' quality of work-life and job satisfaction.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this study, two emergency medical services (EMS) of Hamedan province were selected and randomly assigned as the experimental and control groups. After the experimental group was trained and quality circles were established in this group, the levels of quality of work-life and job satisfaction were measured in the two groups. Then, the statistical analyses were performed using t-test.
  
  
  RESULTS
  After the intervention, the results showed significant differences between the scores of motivational factors (p=0.001), the total scores of job satisfaction (p=0.003), and the scores of some quality of work life (QWL) conceptual categories including the use and development of capacities (p=0.008), the total space of life (p=0.003), and the total scores of QWL (p=0.031) in the experimental group compared to those in the control group.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This study confirms the effectiveness of quality circles in improving quality of work-life and job satisfaction of nurses working in EMS, and offers their application as a management method that can be used by EMS managers.
authors.affiliation: Nursing and Midwifery Faculty, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran. Electronic address: reza_hosseinabadi@yahoo.com.
authors.forename: Reza
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hosseinabadi
authors.forename: Arezou
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Karampourian
authors.forename: Shoorangiz
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Beiranvand
authors.forename: Yadollah
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Pournia
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003710:Demography; D004632:Emergency Medical Services; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007492:Iran; D007588:Job Satisfaction; D008297:Male; D008332:Management Quality Circles; D009042:Motivation; D011788:Quality of Life; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D000078329:Workforce