The Prospect of Health Sector in Rural Areas of Mazandaran Province with an Emphasis on Measuring Access to health Services

Efforts to eliminate regional disparities and imbalances and to reach access to care standards are one of the essential measures to achieve social justice and sustainable development. In this regard, the equitable distribution of health services in order to ensure public health has been a constant concern for policy makers since long time ago and have led to serious discussion about resource allocation in health. Accordingly, this study tries to assess the performance of the health sector in rural areas of the Mazandran province on the basis of the degree of access to health services. This is a basic research conducted with a descriptive analytical method it statistical population is 19 counties of Mazandaran province and. Its method for collecting information is library research, and data tables and statistics related to census conducted in 2011 in Mazandaran province. Accordingly, 14 health care indicators were extracted and by using Technique for Order Preference by similarity to Ideal Solution and SPSS software of the level of development of rural areas of Mazandaran province, access to health services was measured. The findings of the research show the unacceptable and undesirable situation of access to health services in the province. The access of rural population to health services is very unsatisfactory and there is an unfair distribution of facilities in counties, even in the most developed rural areas such as Neka (factor of 0/53) and Babolsar (factor of 0/51), results are not very satisfactory. The analysis also shows that rural areas of Mazandaran province have been disadvantaged due to the lack of the access to health facilities and resources. The results show that the balanced development of the health sector in the province requires reviewing the allocation of resources and health services, equal distribution of opportunities and enhancing the quality of services in remote areas for the purpose of land use planning. Healthy and capable human resources are considered a prerequisite for sustainable development and this requires making more efforts by authorities and integrated management along with a purposeful and effective planning to resolve imbalances.