Evaluation of physicians and paramedical doctor's viewpoints on the family physician as a lost link in the medical system of Iran

Materials and methods.

This is a cross sectional study, which was carried out by a questionnaire. Using simple random sampling method, 400 individuals from related jobs were selected among them, 100 were specialists and 300 health care providers were general practitioners, lab specialists, pharmacists and other jobs related to medical services.

The questionnaire consisted of 19 questions. Six questions were descriptive and the remaining were open questions including needed courses for family physician, type of family problems could be solved by family physicians, the number of family physicians needed to be trained for each 100000 people, the most common needed places for family physicians, the problems to be established a family physician specialty etc. Three personal identifiers questions were included at the beginning of the questionnaire. These were kind of specialty, experience, and the type of job as to governmental or private sectors.

Results.

Data of completed questionnaires were collected and analyzed using SPSS (Version 11.5) by a statistician. Our findings showed that 7.8% of the respondents disagreed (about the nature?) of this specialty. Fifty-one and forty-eight percent of the family physician were successful in two governmental and private sectors respectively (Table 1).

Table 1: Comparison of the rate of success of family physicians in private and governmental sectors.

The question of duplicated services and interventional measures offered by general practitioners revealed that 72% believed that some general practitioners must be active as family physicians after a training course, whereas, 45% believed that by establishing this field, their problems will increase (Table 2).

Table 2: Evaluation of duplicated efforts of general and family physicians.