Effective factors on the utilization of health population covered by the urban family physician program in Iran

The urban family physician program for increase the utilization of health services has been implemented in Fars and Mazandaran provinces since 2012. In this way, this study aimed to determine the benefit level for population covered by the urban family physician program in Iran.

This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2017. Participants on the households covered by the urban family physician program; were selected by random cluster sampling. The data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of 2 parts: individual variables and benefit level of health services with 33 open and closed questions; its validity and reliability were confirmed.

Among 1768 households with a population of 5628 people, 5521(98.1%) had one type of basic insurance. 0.31% of the people who had supplementary insurance. The average time between the home and the work place for the family physician was 18.6±18.9 minutes on foot and 5.7±5.1 by car. Correspondingly, 75.8% of those who had basic insurance were visited at least once by their family physician. The average family physician visits for participants over 15 years old was 5.14 times per year. Factors such as health records, household size, supplementary insurance, illness, education, occupation, physician replacement, availability time, and familiarity with the Family Physician Program were effective in terms of coverage of the affected population with a meaningful level (P<0.05).

This study showed that all covered individuals did not benefit from the urban family physician program, and a number of individual factors influenced the benefit of the urban family physician program.