Status and Barriers to Implementation of Family Physician Program in Iran Health System

Family physician program is one of the most important policies that has been proposed in the past decade in the field of health system. Hence the importance and necessity of studying it originate from the importance and the status of health in development and welfare of a society. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the status and the process of the implementation of the Family Physician Program in Iran's health system. This study answers these questions that what is the historical, legal and execution background of family physician program? And what are the challenges and obstacles to implement this program?
This research was a qualitative study applying the purposive sampling method . .Data were collected through applying interview and document analysis techniques. The data drawn by interview were analyzed using content analysis, which was based on coding.
Concurrent with detecting the historical, legal and execution background of the family physician program, executive barriers were identified based on four categories: “dependency of plans to person and the impact of management and government changes on the national program”, “challenges emanating from the way the tenth government supports family physician program”, “cultural challenges” and “illegality and lack of political determination and commitment of senior officials”.
Family physician program that has been gradually introduced in the health system since 2002 should have been implemented across Iran, according to the existing law such as the fourth and fifth development plans. However, in practice its implementation was limited to villages and two provinces of Fars and Mazandaran and with different procedures . This study showed that many of the economic, social, political and cultural conditions which had a key role in the success or failure of any program and should be taken into account in policy making were not satisfied.