estimate general practitioners active supply in iran: capture-recapture method for three data sources

Background: accurate estimation of active general practitioners (gps) is a concern for health authorities to estimate requirements. this study aimed to accurately estimate gps active supply in iran using three sources capture-recapture (crc) method. methods: this cross-sectional study collected data during 2015-2016, targeting all gps registered in three independent data sources; a national survey from all hospitals, database of human resource management office at health ministry and physicians' offices databank. variables including medical council codes, gp names, sur-names and national id codes were used for data linkage among the three sources. three sources crc method was applied using log-linear models to estimate the total number of active gps in stata software. results: overall, 27,048 gps were identified after removing the duplicate records. based on crc three sources data, the total number of gps were 53,630 in 2015-2016. distribution of gps per 1,000 population among the provinces indicates that provinces of kohgiluyeh & boyer ahmad, mazandaran, golestan and yazd with ratios of 1.28, 1.28, 1.21 and 1.17 physicians rank the highest proportion of gps and the provinces of sistan & baluchestan, ilam, zanjan, alborz, north khorasan with corresponding ratios of 0.24, 0.40, 0.40, 0.43 and 0.45 gps ranked the lowest. conclusion: crc method is known to be the best and rapidest method to estimate active gp due to its com-patibility for the current situation of databanks in iran. therefore, this method is a good application in human resource distribution and planning.