Physician dual practice: A descriptive mapping review of literature

Background: physician dual practice is a common phenomenon in almost all countries throughout the world,which could potential impacts on access,equity and quality of services. this paper aims to review studies in physician dual practice and categorize them in order to their main objectives and purposes. methods: comprehensive literature searches were undertaken in order to obtain main papers and documents in the field of physician dual practice. systematic searches in medline and embase from 1960 to 2013,and general searches in some popular search engines were carried out in this way. after that,descriptive mapping review methods were utilized to categorize eligible studies in this area. results: the searches obtained 404 titles,of which 81 full texts were assessed. finally,24 studies were eligible for inclusion in our review. these studies were categorized into four groups-motivation and forces behind dual prac-tice