Target Income of Iranian General Practitioners: A Descriptive Helpful Study for Policies Related to Rational and Equitable Payment

General practitioners (GPs), as a main provider of primary health care, play a pivotal role in resource flows and responsiveness of healthcare systems. In this regard, a main issue in health policy making is how much money is considered desired by GPs (target income). Therefore, the current study was performed to analyze the GPs’ target income in Iran.
This is a cross sectional and descriptive study. The questionnaire was designed based on the literature review and expert opinion. The data were gathered by a survey on 666 GPs using convenience sampling in 2015. Descriptive statistics, t-test, as well as ANOVA were used for statistical analysis. The analysis was performed using STATA 12.
The mean of monthly target income and actual income of studied GPs were 14613138 (SD= 10323692) and 6555573 (SD = 5299751) TOMAN, respectively. In average, the GPs reached to approximately 50% of their financial expectations. The GPs’ target income was almost 10 times Iran’s income per capita. There was a significant difference (P While the average of GPs’ financial expectations with regard to the Iran economic capacity is high, there are large inequalities in financial expectations between GPs, so that the large percent of the GPs have low and reasonable financial expectations.