Challenges and solutions for implementing the health sector development plans of the Islamic Republic of Iran: A review of the last two decades

Considering the necessity of learning from past experiences and continuous improvement in order to prepare development plans, the present study examines the challenges and strategies to implement health-related provisions in the first to sixth development plans. The current research was conducted in the form of a scoping review. Studies published in English and Persian 2000 until the end of November 2021 were reviewed. The search was done in the databases (SID, Magiran, Ensani.Ir, Irandoc, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, Pubmed) and related journals. 262 studies were obtained, after removing unrelated, duplicate studies and quality assessment, finally articles were selected for final analysis. CASP checklist was used to evaluate the quality. Conventional content analysis approach with Max-QDA 12 was used for data analysis. 262 studies were obtained, finally 16 articles were selected and analyzed. Challenges and solutions related to implementing the health sector development plans of the Islamic Republic of Iran in seven main dimensions including: the program development approach; Policy makers and executives; Execution and implementation of the program, program development, program monitoring challenges; Content of the program; and Lack of following the principles of planning and 51 sub dimensions were extracted that the lack of a clear definition of the concepts of development and development planning; Non-compliance of program provisions with general policies; Lack of meaningful and developmental supervision; Multiple goals and priorities were among challenges. Also, the corresponding solutions of each challenge based on the review of studies included 47 sub dimensions that the correct implementation of the principles of coherent planning, definition of appropriate indicators, mechanisms for gathering information, evaluation of the program, political support, creating a unified understanding between stakeholders, adapting the design of executive programs to infrastructure and moving to mixed programs were among the solutions. Human-centered approaches to development place a lot of value on health and believe that unless an efficient health system governs the society, societies and nations cannot achieve their economic and social goals. Therefore, discussions and planning in this area are very important; Therefore, the identified challenges resulting from this study and the solutions to overcome them can help to formulate, implement and finally evaluate the future development plans.