Family Medicine vs Community Medicine in Iran

Abstract

In the early 1970s 15% of all Iranian Medical Graduates (IMG) left Iran and migrated to the United States(1, 2), while 50.000 villages in Iran had no health coverage(3). The initiation of the Department of Community Medicine in Shiraz Medical School was based on the gross misdistribution of health care facilities in Iran, when at the time 70% of population was residing in rural communities and almost 90% of all health facilities were concentrated in Tehran and larger cities (3). The main reason why Shiraz was among the institutions in Iran that initiated this endeavor was the fact that at the time, up to 90% of its medical graduates was deployed in Western countries, particularly the United States (2, 3).