Barefoot Doctors
Barefoot Doctors was one of the most important inspirations for primary health care because they illustrated the effectiveness of having a health care professional at the community level with community ties. The barefoot doctors were people who lived in the rural areas and received basic training on health care. In other words, they were a diverse array of village health workers who lived in the community. They stressed rural rather than urban health care and preventive rather than curative services. They also provided a combination of western and traditional medicines. An important feature of the Chinese Barefoot Doctors was that the doctors had close community ties, relatively low-cost, and most importantly they encouraged self-reliance through advocating prevention and hygiene practices. The program experienced a massive expansion of rural medical services in communist China. The number of barefoot doctors increased dramatically between the early 1960s and the Cultural Revolution (1964-1976).
Read more about this topic: Primary Health Care
Famous quotes containing the words barefoot and/or doctors:
“A young person is a person with nothing to learn
One who already knows that ice does not chill and fire does not burn . . .
It knows it can spend six hours in the sun on its first
day at the beach without ending up a skinless beet,
And it knows it can walk barefoot through the barn
without running a nail in its feet. . . .
Meanwhile psychologists grow rich
Writing that the young are ones’ should not
undermine the self-confidence of which.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)