Running a same query multiple times?

If it's exact same query, you probably ought to try and reuse values. Dependency injection would work quite well for this, or you could implement internal caching just for that model method:

PHP Code:

private $_get_content_cache = null;

public function get_content()
{
    if (is_null($this->_get_content_cache)) {
        $q = $this->db->get(...);
        $this->_get_content_cache = $q->result();
    }
    return $this->_get_content_cache;
}