TEHRAN – The health ministry is planning to start the Family Physician Program in cities and villages with a population of less than 20,000 individuals on June 22, the first day of summer.

The program will gradually target other parts of the country as well, ISNA quoted Health Minister Mohammad-Reza Zafarqandi as saying.

In April, Zafarqandi said the Family Physician Program will 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 also targeted villages and cities inhabited by fewer than twenty thousand 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.

MT/MG