Mohammad Sharifi-Moghaddam, secretary-general of the Nurses’ Association of Iran, reported that “around 60,000 to 70,000” unemployed nurses in Iran are unwilling to return to work.
Speaking to the state-run Ham-Mihan daily on Saturday, October 18, Sharifi-Moghaddam said, “A salary below 200 million rials (approximately 180$) for a woman with two children only covers childcare expenses, and she must also bear the emotional cost of being away from her children. Therefore, staying home is actually less costly for her.”
Emphasizing that nurses lack motivation to work, he added that officials in the Ministry of Health “have no understanding of these wages because their own salaries are in the hundreds of millions of rials.”
Thousands of Unemployed Nurses Show Little Interest in Job Postings
He had previously stressed that harsh working conditions, psychological stress, and wage inequality have caused many nurses to lose interest in their profession and seek ways to leave hospital work altogether.
According to Sharifi-Moghaddam, some nurses have shifted to jobs in insurance and medical equipment, while others have turned to unrelated fields such as nail care or driving for ride-hailing apps.
Nursing graduates are not entering the workforce
Mansoureh Khavari, head of nursing at Mahdieh Hospital, also stated on October 18 that nurses’ salaries do not reflect their workload or the difficulty of their jobs, leading nursing graduates to show little interest in entering the workforce.
She said that the situation has become so unfavorable that the number of applicants for the nursing employment exams is lower than the available quotas allocated to medical universities.
Khavari added, “If nurses’ working conditions, overtime, and pay were aligned with the difficulty of their work, the situation would change, and more graduates would be eager to join the workforce.”
In another Ham-Mihan report, Karim Abedini, a nurse in the adult chemotherapy ward of a Tehran hospital, said that in some hospital wards, two nurses and one assistant are responsible for as many as 30 patients.
According to healthcare system standards, there should be three nurses per 1,000 citizens or two active nurses for each hospital bed.
Ideally, the nurse-to-bed ratio should be about two nurses per bed, but in Iran, the national average is around 1.1, dropping to as low as 0.8 in some provinces.
Abbas Ebadi, deputy minister of nursing at the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Health, announced on August 30 that since March 21, 2025, a total of 570 nurses have emigrated from Iran. He stated that the country currently needs 100,000 nurses.
Sharifi-Moghaddam also stressed on October 11 that the official statistics on nurse emigration are inaccurate, as many leave the country without formal migration documentation.
