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:
“Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.”
—Primo Levi (19191987)
“At last I feel the equal of my parents. Knowing you are going to have a child is like extending yourself in the world, setting up a tent and saying Here I am, I am important. Now that Im going to have a child its like the balance is even. My hand is as rich as theirs, maybe for the first time. I am no longer just a child.”
—Anonymous Father. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Womens Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)