Ghasem Abutalebi, head of Iran’s regime Nurse Council, announced that the country is facing a shortage of 165,000 nurses. At the same time, Abbas Ebadi, the regime’s deputy minister of nursing at the Ministry of Health, attributed the delay in paying nurses’ arrears to two main reasons: the failure to allocate budget bonds and the delay of insurance companies in fulfilling their financial obligations.
On Wednesday, October 22, during Nurses’ Day ceremonies in Shiraz, Abutalebi said: “The nurse-to-hospital-bed ratio in Iran is 0.9, while it was supposed to reach 1.8 by the end of the Sixth Development Plan.”
He said that the global standard is an average of three nurses per hospital bed and added: “Currently, 165,000 nurses are working in the country, and with this shortage, we need to recruit an equal number to address the deficit in healthcare centers.”
According to Abutalebi, a plan to hire 15,000 nurses annually has been drafted by the Ministry of Health and is in the approval process.
Earlier, on October 6, Mohammad Sharighi-Moghaddam, secretary-general of Iran’s Nurses’ House, stated that harsh working conditions, psychological pressure, and wage inequality have caused many nurses to become disillusioned with their profession and seek ways to leave hospitals.
Sharighi-Moghaddam described the state of nursing in Iran as critical, saying that while the healthcare system is suffering from a severe shortage of staff, more than 60,000 nurses in Iran are unemployed, and nursing school capacities continue to increase each year.
Nurses’ Protests in Kermanshah and Khuzestan
The state-run ILNA news agency reported on Wednesday, October 22, that nurses from Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences held a protest over unpaid wages and low salaries, saying their nursing tariffs had not been paid for more than nine months, and many earn less than 20 million tomans (approximately 1.8 million rials or about $180) per month.
At the same time, nurses in Khuzestan also gathered in front of the provincial governor’s office, stressing the need to pay their back wages and improve working conditions, and demanding that officials address their livelihood and legal grievances.
Abbas Ebadi, deputy minister of nursing, told ILNA that the delay in payments to nurses in Kermanshah and Khuzestan was due to delayed insurance reimbursements and the failure to allocate 800 trillion rials (approximately 696 million dollars) in bonds to the Ministry of Health under the 2025 budget.
Over the past several years, nurses and other healthcare workers across Iran have repeatedly held protests, sit-ins, and strikes in response to the government’s failure to address their demands.
The severe shortage of nurses and the government’s continued neglect of professional demands come despite international health standards requiring at least three nurses per 1,000 people or at least two nurses per hospital bed.
However, reports indicate that Iran has reached at most half of these minimum standards — a gap that manifests itself in long shifts, occupational burnout, and declining quality of services, particularly in emergency rooms and intensive care units.
