subject: Primary Healthcare An Overview [print this page] Health care is constantly undergoing change and refinement resulting from the adoption of new practices and technologies, the changing nature of societies and populations, and also shifts in the very places from which care is delivered. Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place draws together significant contributions from established experts across a variety of disciplines to focus on such changes in primary health care, not only because it is the most basic and integral form of health service delivery, but also because it is an area to which geographers have made significant contributions and to which other scholars have engaged in 'thinking geographically' about its core concepts and issues. Including perspectives from both consumers and producers, it moves beyond geographical accounts of the context of health service provision through its explicit focus on the practice of primary health care.
Primary Health Care is the essential care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable method and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a cost they and the country can afford to maintain in the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination. Primary health care reflects and evolves from the economic conditions and sociocultural and political characteristics of the country and its communities and it addresses the main health problems in the community providing primitive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative services. It includes education concerning prevailing health problems and the methods of preventing and controlling them and in addition to the health sector; it addresses all related sectors and aspects of national and community development example, agriculture, education, housing etc.
It forms an integral part of the countrys health system. It is the first level of contact of individuals, the family and the community with the national health system bringing health care as close as possible to where people live and work.
Basic principles of primary healthcare include:
Community participation
Inter-sectoral collaboration
Integration of health care programs
Equity
Self-reliance
The international conference on primary health care declared the following in 1978:
Health is a fundamental human right and that the attainment of the highest possible level of health is a most important worldwide social goal.
The existing gross inequality in the health status of the people particularly between developed and developing countries is politically, socially and economically unacceptable.
Economic and social development, based on a new international economic order is of basic importance to the fullest attainment of health for all.
The people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care.
Government have a responsibility for the health of their people which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social; measures.
All government should formulate national policies, strategies and plans of action to launch and sustain primary health care.
All countries should cooperate in a spirit of partnership and service to ensure PHC for all people.
An acceptable level of health for all the people of the world by the year 2000 can be attained through a further and better use of the worlds resources.
Community participation is the hallmark of primary health care, without which it will not succeed. Community participation is a process by which individuals and family assume responsibility for their own health and those of the community and develop the capacity to contribute to their/and the community development.
