This year, the issue of suicide among Iran’s healthcare personnel resurfaced with the death of a young cardiac specialist in the third week of March and a nurse in Kermanshah. It is said that, due to not renewing her contract and psychological pressures, she ended her life. The exact number of nurse suicides is not officially known, but the number is alarming. Work-related and psychological pressures on healthcare staff are among the main reasons for suicides.
This comes despite severe shortages of nurses in hospitals, where short-term contracts of 89 days are signed with them. Such contracts deprive nurses of many of their rights and future claims if they become unemployed, and they refer to these contracts as “seasonal workers”.
Mohammad Sharifi Moghadam, the secretary-general of the Iranian regime’s Nurses’ House, described the number of young nurse deaths in 2023 as high, but did not provide statistics. He believes that the field is narrow for nurses, and all officials are responsible for creating such an environment.
Fariborz Dartaaj, the head of the Iranian Educational Psychology Association, described the situation of nurses as stressful due to the nature of their job and cited a study conducted among nurses in Malayer city in 2021, stating, “15.38% of nurses had moderate to severe depression, and 46.47% had moderate to severe anxiety. 27.56% had suicidal thoughts, and 9.94% were ready to commit suicide.”
Hospitals without nurses
According to the World Bank, there are two active nurses per thousand people in Iran. This information is obtained from the World Health Organization’s global health workforce statistics and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The World Bank warns that the shortage of nurses is a growing health hazard in many countries.
A nurse at a public hospital says nurses work 44 hours a week or 175 hours a month, but due to the shortage of staff in most centers, nurses are forced to work about 300 to 400 hours. Overtime compensation for nurses in government hospitals is calculated at 200,000 rials (approximately $0.3) per hour and for contract nurses at 14,800 rials (approximately $0.22) per hour.
In November 2023, the secretary-general of the Nurses’ House announced, “Patients lose their lives due to a shortage of nurses. Over 3,000 nurses emigrate from the country annually, but the Ministry of Health does not even add this amount to the healthcare staff.”
In the summer of 2021, the head of the Iranian Nursing Organization said, “Despite 20,000-30,000 unemployed nurses in the country, we are facing a shortage of over 100,000 nurses.”
An 89-day contract means the minimum rights and benefits and being placed in precarious and unsafe conditions. If this contract is 90 days or longer, the nurse can claim rights and benefits according to labor laws, but an 89-day contract can be repeated several times, each time for 89 days, so the nurse has no legal recourse for job security.
The base salary of an official nurse with five years of experience is 130 million rials (approximately $198), which reaches about 150 to 160 million rials (approximately $228 to $243) including benefits. However, the salaries of contractual nurses are much lower than this amount.
Sharifi Moghadam, the secretary-general of the Nurses’ House, says that the determination of tariffs, changing the status and recruitment of nurses, receiving shortages, mandatory overtime with very low wages, and delayed payments in some hospitals are major problems for nurses, and nurses usually face requests and threats of dismissal if they object to such situations.
According to the secretary-general of the Nurses’ House, the nursing community in Iran has been severely crisis-ridden, and no official pays attention to this situation.
