Primary health care, often abbreviated as "PHC", has been defined as "essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community 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. There were many factors that inspired Primary Health Care, a prominent example is the Barefoot doctors of China, who were a major inspiration to the primary health care movement in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan in 1978.
This ideal model of health care was adopted in the declaration of the International Conference on Primary Health Care held in Alma Ata 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.
Read more about Primary Health Care: Goals and Principles, Approaches, Barefoot Doctors, Criticisms of Primary Health Care and The Alma Ata Declaration, Problems, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words primary, health and/or care:
“The traditional American husband and father had the responsibilitiesand the privilegesof playing the role of primary provider. Sharing that role is not easy. To yield exclusive access to the role is to surrender some of the potential for fulfilling the hero fantasya fantasy that appeals to us all. The loss is far from trivial.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“Some fear that if parents start listening to their own wants and needs they will neglect their children. It is our belief that children are in fact far less likely to be neglected when their parents needsfor support, for friendship, for decent work, for health care, for learning, for play, for time aloneare being met.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Womens Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“Every day care center, whether it knows it or not, is a school. The choice is never between custodial care and education. The choice is between unplanned and planned education, between conscious and unconscious education, between bad education and good education.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)