Time Measurement of Services Provided by the Urban Family Physician in Mazandaran Province

Background and purpose: Access to primary healthcare services, considering equity and equality in the health system, is a right of the global community. To provide primary health services, the rural family physician program was implemented at the beginning of 2005 to achieve universal health coverage in rural areas and small cities (with a population of less than 20,000). The specific goals of this program included the implementation of the referral system, increasing the responsiveness of the health market, increasing people’s access to health services, reducing unnecessary costs in the health market, and increasing service coverage. After approximately 7 years of implementation of this program, the urban family physician program started in Mazandaran and Fars province as a pilot project. The urban family physician program started in the Mazandaran province in 2012 as the first level of providing health services. In line with the better implementation of this program and considering the wide range of expected programs and activities, it is essential to entrust the appropriate activities with the time of the service providers. This study was conducted to assess the expected duration of activities assigned to the family physician. Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 15 urban family physician centers (6 government and 9 private centers) in Golugah, Behshahr, Neka, Ghaemshahr, Noor, and Chalus cities of Mazandaran province. Out of 15 cities with more than 20,000 people participating in this program in Mazandaran province, the six cities mentioned above were randomly selected, and 15 urban family doctors were randomly selected from the existing list. Finally, the target groups were included in the study for convenience sampling. To collect the data, checklists compiled based on care packages corresponding to 8 groups of service recipients (elderly (11 services), middle-aged (7 services), youth (13 services), teenagers (24 services), under 5 years old (6 services), mana (15 services), mothers (3 services), and non-target visit) were used. For each service recipient group, at least three individuals were examined. Central and dispersion indices were used to describe the data. Results: The results of measuring the time of providing service to 297 people (including 90 under 5 years old, 30 people receiving Mana services, 30 people from each of the groups of mothers, teenagers, young people, middle-aged, elderly, and 27 people from non-target visit) showed that the median and mean expected time for providing daily service by an urban family physician to the covered population is 2 h and 52 min and 3 h and 23 min, respectively. The estimated time was different in the groups receiving the service, the highest time of which was related to the visit of the non-target service group with median and mean of 84.17 and 87.20 min, respectively, and the lowest time was related to Mana services with a median and mean of 3.40 and 4.34 min, respectively. Conclusion: Urban family physicians have enough time to provide daily services, and therefore it seems that the health system has not assigned them more than their daily time capacity.