Research in Medical Education

Introduction: Training the efficient human resources needs different specialties such as economic, political, cultural, administrative and environmental sciences alongside proper educational planning. In the recent era, role of non-clinical and non-biomedical disciplines such as social sciences are more eventful. Traditional inpatient education can't fulfill recent medical students' needs and skills. This study was performed to determine the statue of Community Medicine Departments of all Medical schools and Universities in Iran with regard to their faculty members. This study has a focus on the status of Community Medicine Departments of all Medical Sciences schools and Universities of Iran with respect to their faculty members.

 Methods: In this descriptive cross- sectional study some aspects of educational and research processes in departments of Community Medicine in all Medical Universities affiliated to the MOH were analyzed, with a focus on their faculty members. The data was analyzed by SPSS soft ware.

 Results: There were 318 staffs in the Community Medicine Departments in all three classes of universities, 209 (65.7%) faculty and 92 (28.9%) non- faculty member and 17 (5.3%) were unkown. All these schools and universities except Guilan university of medical sciences had less Community Medicine Specialist than standard, epidmiology in 9 groups and Biostatistics in 11 groups had sufficient specialists respectively. Except for Beheshti and Kermanshah university of medical scineces, lack of sociologist and behavioural scientists as faculty member in community medicine department in all universities have been observed. At present, totally 22 clinical specialists serve as faculty member in all community medicine department in medical universities, this number is out of standard rate.

Conclusion: most of medical universities in Iran serve irrelevant course in community medicine department without considering, group necessity, course relevancy, and determined standard.