Zoning in the Health Services: Reviewing International Evidence and Iranian Experiences

Classification or zoning the health services refer to the specialarrangement of health care supplier units; so that health services could be available with the lowest cost and the highest quality for society. Zoning is done to provide cheaper services and effective and equitable distribution of resources and avoiding unnecessary services.Current study has been done to identify the experiences of other countries. Present study is a systematic and meta-synthesis review which is done by of all Persian and English researches that investigated strategies, patterns, processes, results and experiences of leveling and zoning the health care services that entered in systematic review and by using 7 steps technique of meta-synthesis and combination and integration of obtained findings of systematic review. In this part, all of the researches, documents, reports, and evidences of zoning of active countries with the effective experiences for implementing zoning policy are collected and presented.Most of the documents of health services zoning is in US, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Australia and Cuba.Decreasing the expenses and increasing the safety and satisfaction of patients from health services and lack of coordination and information sharing, are the most important challenges of health care zoning in health systems. Findings of this article mentioned the importance of implementation of services zoning for equitable access to health care and also mentioned benefits and limitations that need to be considered to design an appropriate zoning model.