Role of Primary Health Care

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the main objective of primary health care is to provide better overall health for everyone. In order to accomplish this goal, WHO states five key goals: first, to reduce exclusion and social health disparities, second, to organize health services based on individuals' needs and expectations, third, to integrate health into all industry sectors, fourth, to reform leadership, and lastly, to increase stakeholder participation.

History

• Primary health care became a core policy for the World Health Organization in 1978, when the Alma-Ata Declaration announced the goal to have "health for all" by the Year 2000. The Declaration stated that health is "a fundamental human right and that the attainment of the highest possible level of health is a most important world-wide social goal whose realization requires the action of many other social and economic sectors in addition to the health sector."

Role of Primary Care Physician

• Primary care physicians are the first level of health care. Primary care physicians are trained in many different medical disciplines and focus on disease prevention more than responding to crises. Primary care medicine has three subsets of physicians, including general practitioners (GPs), internal medicine, and pediatricians. GPs focus on general family health care, internists diagnose, and treat diseases and may specialize in a certain area of the body and pediatricians focus on treating children.

Disease Prevention

• Primary health care focuses largely on the prevention of disease. Consider the following example: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. Primary health care seeks to control and prevent sedentary and obese patient lifestyles by educating patients about eating health and exercises. Primary care physicians, such as Paul Ehrmann, D.O., offer preventative wellness services to help their patients prevent diseases and lead healthier lifestyles.

Healthcare Reform

• One of the goals of primary health care, according to the World Health Organization, is universal health care reform. WHO identifies four different types of health care reform: universal coverage reforms, which ensure that health care provides universal access and protection to all individuals, service delivery reforms, which make health systems more "people-centered," public policy reforms, which promote and protect the rights of communities, and leadership reforms, which make health care leadership more reliable.

Future Strategy

• According to WHO, key strategies that play a role in primary health care include reducing death rates in poor populations by increasing access to health care, reducing the leading risk factors to human health by focusing on preventative medicine, developing sustainable health systems, and integrating primary health care policy with other social, economic, and environmental policies.