Estimation of the requirement for cardiologists in Iran in year 2020 by benchmarking method

Objectiv (s): The growth in the Iranian population and changes in its ratio in the year 1400 A.H. and also the increase in the frequency of cardiovascular diseases depict the need for scheduling and assessing the requirements for training more cardiologists in the future. By library search, we found reliable estimations of the Iranian population in the year 1400 and the available proportion of cardiologists in different countries in year 2000 by searching available databases. The average proportions of cardiologists in 31 countries were 45 per million people. However, in Iran it was 16-20 cardiologists per million people in 2010. It’s estimated that the population of Iran will rise to 86 million people by 2021. Therefore, if we consider the proportion of 45 cardiologists per million people as the referee, we already need 3870 cardiologists at that time. Increasing the proportion of cardiologists seems necessary in Iran. But it seems that increasing the annual health care system budget per capita and making a balance between the training specialized health workers and the real need of the society is also of great importance. An independent study and decision making by the health care authorities are necessary to achieve such a big goal.