Primary Health Care, or PHC refers to "essential health care" that is based on scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology. This makes universal health care accessible to all individuals and families in a community. It is through their full participation and at a cost that the community and the country can afford to maintain at every stage of their development in the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination. In other words, PHC is an approach to health beyond the traditional health care system that focuses on health equity-producing social policy. PHC includes all areas that play a role in health, such as access to health services, environment and lifestyle. Thus, primary healthcare and public health measures, taken together, may be considered as the cornerstones of universal health systems. The World Health Organization, or WHO, elaborates on the goals of PHC as defined by three major categories, "empowering people and communities, multisectoral policy and action; and primary care and essential public health functions as the core of integrated health service." Based on these definitions, PHC can not only help an individual after being diagnosed with a disease or disorder, but actively prevent such issues by understanding the individual as a whole.
This ideal model of healthcare was adopted in the declaration of the International Conference on Primary Health Care held in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan in 1978 (known as the "Alma Ata Declaration"), and became a core concept of the World Health Organization's goal of Health for all. The Alma-Ata Conference mobilized a "Primary Health Care movement" of professionals and institutions, governments and civil society organizations, researchers and grassroots organizations that undertook to tackle the "politically, socially and economically unacceptable" health inequalities in all countries. There were many factors that inspired PHC; a prominent example is the Barefoot Doctors of China.
Goals and principles
A primary health care worker in Saudi Arabia, 2008
The ultimate goal of primary healthcare is the attainment of better health services for all. It is for this reason that the World Health Organization (WHO), has identified five key elements to achieving this goal:
- reducing exclusion and social disparities in health (universal coverage reforms);
- organizing health services around people's needs and expectations (service delivery reforms);
- integrating health into all sectors (public policy reforms);
- pursuing collaborative models of policy dialogue (leadership reforms); and
- increasing stakeholder participation.
Behind these elements lies a series of basic principles identified in the Alma Ata Declaration
that should be formulated in national policies in order to launch and
sustain PHC as part of a comprehensive health system and in coordination
with other sectors:
- Equitable distribution of health care – according to this principle, primary care and other services to meet the main health problems in a community must be provided equally to all individuals irrespective of their gender, age, caste, color, urban/rural location and social class.
- Community participation – in order to make the fullest use of local, national and other available resources. Community participation was considered sustainable due to its grass roots nature and emphasis on self-sufficiency, as opposed to targeted (or vertical) approaches dependent on international development assistance.
- Health human resources development – comprehensive healthcare relies on an adequate number and distribution of trained physicians, nurses, allied health professions, community health workers and others working as a health team and supported at the local and referral levels.
- Use of appropriate technology – medical technology should be provided that is accessible, affordable, feasible and culturally acceptable to the community. Examples of appropriate technology include refrigerators for cold vaccine storage. Less appropriate examples of medical technology could include, in many settings, body scanners or heart-lung machines, which benefit only a small minority concentrated in urban areas. They are generally not accessible to the poor, but draw a large share of resources.
- Multi-sectional approach – recognition that health cannot be improved by intervention within just the formal health sector; other sectors are equally important in promoting the health and self-reliance of communities. These sectors include, at least: agriculture (e.g. food security); education; communication (e.g. concerning prevailing health problems and the methods of preventing and controlling them); housing; public works (e.g. ensuring an adequate supply of safe water and basic sanitation); rural development; industry; community organizations (including Panchayats or local governments, voluntary organizations, etc.).
In sum, PHC recognizes that healthcare is not a short-lived
intervention, but an ongoing process of improving people's lives and
alleviating the underlying socioeconomic conditions that contribute to
poor health. The principles link health, development, and advocating
political interventions rather than passive acceptance of economic
conditions.
Approaches
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The hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) in Manado, Indonesia, during Pacific Partnership 2012.
The primary health care approach has seen significant gains in health
where applied even when adverse economic and political conditions
prevail.
Although the declaration made at the Alma-Ata conference deemed
to be convincing and plausible in specifying goals to PHC and achieving
more effective strategies, it generated numerous criticisms and
reactions worldwide. Many argued the declaration did not have clear
targets, was too broad, and was not attainable because of the costs and
aid needed. As a result, PHC approaches have evolved in different
contexts to account for disparities in resources and local priority
health problems; this is alternatively called the Selective Primary
Health Care (SPHC) approach.
Selective Primary Health Care
After
the year 1978 Alma Ata Conference, the Rockefeller Foundation held a
conference in 1979 at its Bellagio conference center in Italy to address
several concerns. Here, the idea of Selective Primary Health Care was
introduced as a strategy to complement comprehensive PHC. It was based
on a paper by Julia Walsh and Kenneth S. Warren entitled “Selective
Primary Health Care, an Interim Strategy for Disease Control in
Developing Countries”.
This new framework advocated a more economically feasible approach to
PHC by only targeting specific areas of health, and choosing the most
effective treatment plan in terms of cost and effectiveness. One of the
foremost examples of SPHC is "GOBI" (growth monitoring, oral
rehydration, breastfeeding, and immunization), focusing on combating the main diseases in developing nations.
GOBI and GOBI-FFF
GOBI
is a strategy consisting of (and an acronym for) four low-cost, high
impact, knowledge mediated measures introduced as key to halving child mortality by James P. Grant at UNICEF in 1983. The measure are:
- Growth monitoring: the monitoring of how much infants grow within a period, with the goal to understand needs for better early nutrition.
- Oral rehydration therapy: to combat dehydration associated with diarrhea.
- Breastfeeding
- Immunization
Three additional measure were introduced to the strategy later
(though food supplementation had been used by UNICEF since it#'s
inception in 1946), leading to the acronym GOBI-FFF.
- Family planning (birth spacing)
- Female education
- Food supplementation: for example, iron and folic acid fortification/supplementation to prevent deficiencies in pregnant women.
These strategies focus on severe population health problems in
certain developing countries, where a few diseases are responsible for
high rates of infant
and child mortality. Health care planning is used to see which
diseases require most attention and, subsequently, which intervention
can be most effectively applied as part of primary care in a least-cost
method. The targets and effects of selective PHC are specific and
measurable. The approach aims to prevent most health and nutrition problems before they begin.
PHC and population aging
Given
global demographic trends, with the numbers of people age 60 and over
expected to double by 2025, PHC approaches have taken into account the
need for countries to address the consequences of population ageing.
In particular, in the future the majority of older people will be
living in developing countries that are often the least prepared to
confront the challenges of rapidly ageing societies, including high risk
of having at least one chronic non-communicable disease, such as diabetes and osteoporosis. According to WHO, dealing with this increasing burden requires health promotion and disease prevention intervention at the community level as well as disease management strategies within health care systems.
PHC and mental health
Some
jurisdictions apply PHC principles in planning and managing their
healthcare services for the detection, diagnosis and treatment of common
mental health
conditions at local clinics, and organizing the referral of more
complicated mental health problems to more appropriate levels of mental
health care.
The Ministerial Conference, which took place in Alma Ata, made the
decision that measures should be taken to support mental health in
regard to primary health care. However, there was no such documentation
of this event in the Alma Ata Declaration. These discrepancies caused an
inability for proper funding and although was worthy of being a part of
the declaration, changing it would call for another conference.
Individuals with severe mental health disorders are found to live
much shorter lives than those without, anywhere from ten to
twenty-five-year reduction in life expectancy when compared to those
without. Cardiovascular diseases
in particular are one of the leading deaths with individuals already
suffering from severe mental health disorders. General health services
such as PHC is one approach to integrating an improved access to such
health services that could help treat already existing mental health
disorders as well as prevent other disorders that could arise
simultaneously as the pre-existing condition.
Background and controversies
Barefoot Doctors
The
"Barefoot Doctors" of China were an important inspiration for PHC
because they illustrated the effectiveness of having a healthcare
professional at the community level with community ties. Barefoot
Doctors were a diverse array of village health workers who lived in
rural areas and received basic healthcare training. They stressed rural
rather than urban healthcare, and preventive rather than curative
services. They also provided a combination of western and traditional
medicines. The Barefoot Doctors had close community ties, were
relatively low-cost, and perhaps most importantly they encouraged
self-reliance through advocating prevention and hygiene practices.
The program experienced a massive expansion of rural medical services
in China, with the number of Barefoot Doctors increasing dramatically
between the early 1960s and the Cultural Revolution (1964-1976).
Criticisms
Although
many countries were keen on the idea of primary healthcare after the
Alma Ata conference, the Declaration itself was criticized for being too
“idealistic” and “having an unrealistic time table”.
More specific approaches to prevent and control diseases - based on
evidence of prevalence, morbidity, mortality and feasibility of control
(cost-effectiveness) - were subsequently proposed. The best known model
was the Selective PHC approach (described above). Selective PHC favoured
short-term goals and targeted health investment, but it did not address
the social causes of disease. As such, the SPHC approach has been
criticized as not following Alma Ata's core principle of everyone's
entitlement to healthcare and health system development.
In Africa, the PHC system has been extended into isolated rural
areas through construction of health posts and centers that offer basic
maternal-child health, immunization, nutrition, first aid, and referral
services. Implementation of PHC is said to be affected after the introduction of structural adjustment programs by the World Bank.
