Estimating the Number of Health Care Providers Required in Outskirts Comprehensive Health Service Centers Using the Workload Indicator of the Required Staff

In recent years, many organizations have been searching for the best method to estimate the number of required staff in their organizations. However, since the basis of these methods is forecasting, their results are likely to be challenging, especially in healthcare organizations. Recently, approaches to estimating required staff based on real workload have become very popular in many organizations. In this research, the required number of family health care providers in outskirt comprehensive health service centers has been calculated using the WISN method.

The current survey is a qualitative-quantitative study. In the first stage, effective and important factors for estimating the required personnel in organizations were obtained by reviewing related articles. In the second stage, through the holding of focus group meetings, the micro-activities of the process of providing services by health care providers were extracted. In the third stage, by using the WISN, the difference and the ratio of the available to the desired staff were obtained, and finally, the norm of health care providers required in comprehensive health service centers was calculated.

In the first stage, from the review of related articles, four implicit factors that should be taken into consideration while analyzing the results of using WISN as factors affecting the number of required personnel were obtained. In the next step, the analysis of the results of the focus group meetings led to the identification of 16 main activities, nine supporting activities, and nine additional activities of health care providers. In the third step, by using the standard of main activities, group and specific allowance, ratio, and difference of WISN were obtained. This ratio was more than one and the difference was positive, indicating the lack of staff and the pressure of work on healthcare workers working in outskirts comprehensive health service centers.

Article reviews show that much research has been conducted in the field of hospitals to estimate the required staff. Unfortunately, despite the great importance of the health sector, the distribution of personnel is still carried out using the ratio of area population. Therefore, the necessity of conducting more studies in this broad and important field is evident. The data was collected from the country's ten regions or poles of medical sciences universities. Therefore, the obtained information can be used to estimate the required number of healthcare workers countrywide, taking regional differences into account.