Abolghasem Aboutalebi, a member of the Supreme Nursing Council in Iran, has described the situation of nurses’ migration from the country as a “near crisis” and called for finding solutions.
According to Aboutalebi, while approximately 10,000 nursing personnel are trained in the country annually, nearly 3,000 nurses migrated last year.
Officials from the regime’s Ministry of Health state that the destination of nurse migration includes a wide range of countries, from neighboring nations and the Persian Gulf region to Western and European countries, as well as South Africa.
Aboutalebi also criticized the slow hiring of nurses, stating that to meet the standard of 2.5 nurses per bed, the current number of 240,000 nurses in the country should triple.
On December 11, 2023, the regime’s official IRNA news agency, in a report titled “Nurses Migrating, Officials Watching,” quoted Mohammad Sharifi Moghadam, the Secretary-General of the Nursing House, highlighting the consequences of the nursing shortage, including patients losing their lives.
Sharifi Moghadam also reported dissatisfaction among over 90% of nurses in Iran, attributing it to livelihood problems, income disparities, discrimination within the medical staff, improper implementation of tariff laws, staff shortages, mandatory overtime with “very minimal compensation,” and job burnout.
In explaining the income gap between healthcare staff, Sharifi Moghadam stated that the average salary of a newly hired nurse is 90 million rials (approximately $151), which doesn’t even cover the cost of renting a home, while a specialized government-employed physician earns over 1.4 billion rials (approximately $2,345) per month.
Nurses are among the groups that, in recent months, have expressed their job and livelihood dissatisfaction through mass protests to Iranian regime authorities, demanding attention to their grievances.
These protests have faced punitive measures from Iranian officials, including a six-month suspension from service for protesting employees.
While the wave of migration from Iran is not limited to nurses and encompasses a broad spectrum of students, workers, physicians, and specialized professionals, experts have warned about the consequences of the workforce leaving the country.
Morteza Ezati, a university professor and economic expert, recently discussed with the website “Khabar Online,” considering migration as a cause of exacerbating “serious crises” in Iran’s economy and predicting that its consequences will soon manifest in society and the economy.
