TEHRAN –Health Minister Mohammad-Reza Zafarqandi has said the Family Physician Program is planned to kick off in the current Iranian year that started on March 21.

“It is a large-scale program based on social behavior change. Designing new patient pathways, reforming the referral pattern, and improving the healthcare network system requires careful coordination between the Health Ministry, governors, and other relevant institutions at the provincial level,” IRIB quoted Zafarqandi as saying.

So, it is absolutely essential to develop a national headquarters headed by the President to oversee the overall management of the program, he added.

“We have already reached agreements on ten key issues such as financial resources, location, implementation stages, and public information. Moreover, the chancellors of medical sciences universities will hold a meeting this week to finalize the implementation model for the program,” Zafarqandi noted.

The rural family physician program started in 2005. Back then, it targeted villages and cities with a population of less than 20,000 individuals to make treatment referrals more concentrated and provide more convenient access to health services, ISNA reported.

Periodic examinations and monitoring of people’s health status, easy and round-the-clock access to basic services and primary care, and frequent visits to doctors are the characteristics of a family physician.

Medical, dental, mental, midwifery, nutrition, laboratory, pharmaceutical, and medical imaging are among the offered services by the program.

Based on the Family Physician Program, a physician and a midwife offer services in rural areas, every 3,300 villagers have a physician and there is a midwife per 5,200 people in villages.

In September 2023, Mohsen Barouni, an official with the Health Ministry said, “Family Physician Program has been implemented in three phases; in the first phase 59 cities were included in the program; in the second phase, it raised to 93 cities and now a total of 182 cities are covered by the program, covering more than 20 million Iranians,” IRNA reported.

MT/MG