A prediction of the geriatric specialists for the elderly in Iran: a dynamic system

Type Journal Article - WALIA journal
Title A prediction of the geriatric specialists for the elderly in Iran: a dynamic system
Author(s)
Volume 31
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2015
Page numbers 132-138
URL http://waliaj.com/wp-content/2015/Special Issue 2, 2015/26 2015-31-S2-pp.132-138.pdf
Abstract
Maintaining and upgrading the quality of the elderly's lives depends on the goal of services, choosing both
an appropriate strategy and a suitable method for assessing and estimating the human capital needed for the elderly
in the future. Presenting a dynamic system model for predicting the amount of geriatric specialist's proportional
with the population of the elderly from 2009 to 2025. At first a general study was done in libraries on the elderly.
Afterwards data gathering and building structures for determining the amount of geriatric specialists was done
considering the effective factors on this subject. Finally by using the cause and effect diagrams, the flow
accumulation diagrams were determined and the model's equation were determined in the Vensim software
version 5. After simulating the results: from 2005 until 2025 the population of the elderly in Iran has an extremely
steep growth and is predicted to reach 7 million people. This amount is about 8% of the entire population. The
amount of students who had started to study geriatrics from the years 2009 until 2012 had been announced 6
students. According to the results from simulating, the amount of students who will study geriatrics until 2025 will
be about 485 students. The geriatrics specialists who gave services to the elderly in 2009 were only 4. It can be said
that the average growth of this group each year was 1.26%. This means by 2025 the population of geriatric
specialists will be about 283 specialists. This number of specialists is only able to give services to 9% of the elderly.
At the end of the study it was summarized that if the rate of the students of geriatrics grows up to 50% by 2025 the
number of geriatrics will reach about 2800 in the whole country which is a standard rate in this area. This model
shows that, for in order to give service to the elderly, the numbers of students who study geriatrics have to have a
50% growth by 2025. On the other hand, a program needs to be presented to compensate the shortages of the
geriatrics specialists. Finally in can be said that if the present condition goes on, we will need to recruit these
specialists from other countries.

Related studies

»