Primary Health Care – Now More Than Ever
World Health Organization
October 14, 2008
The World Health Report 2008 critically assesses the way that health care is organized, financed, and delivered in rich and poor countries around the world. The WHO report documents a number of failures and shortcomings that have left the health status of different populations, both within and between countries, dangerously out of balance.
Inequities in access to care and in health outcomes are usually greatest in cases where health is treated as a commodity and care is driven by profitability. The results are predictable: unnecessary tests and procedures, more frequent and longer hospital stays, higher overall costs, and exclusion of people who cannot pay.
To steer health systems towards better performance, the report calls for a return to primary health care (PHC), a holistic approach to health care formally launched 30 years ago. When countries at the same level of economic development are compared, those where health care is organized around the tenets of primary health care produce a higher level of heath for the same investment.
This report structures the PHC reforms in four groups that reflect the convergence between the evidence on what is needed for an effective response to the health challenges of today’s world, the values of equity, solidarity and social justice that drive the PHC movement, and the growing expectations of the population in modernizing societies: reforms that ensure
- that health systems contribute to health equity, social justice and the end of exclusion, primarily by moving towards universal access and social health protection — UNIVERSAL COVERAGE REFORMS;
- reforms that reorganize health services as primary care, i.e. around people’s needs and expectations, so as to make them more socially relevant and more responsive to the changing world while producing better outcomes — SERVICE DELIVERY REFORMS;
- reforms that secure healthier communities, by integrating public health actions with primary care and by pursuing healthy public policies across sectors — PUBLIC POLICY REFORMS;
- reforms that replace disproportionate reliance on command and control on one hand, and laissez-faire disengagement of the state on the other, by the inclusive, participatory, negotiation-based leadership required by the complexity of contemporary health systems — LEADERSHIP REFORMS.
In high-expenditure health economies, which is the case of most high-income countries, there is ample financial room to accelerate the shift from tertiary to primary care, create a healthier policy environment and complement a well-established universal coverage system with targeted measures to reduce exclusion.
Even in the United States, its exceptionalism stems not from lower public expenditure… but from its singularly high additional private expenditure. The persistent under-performance of the United States health sector across domains of health outcomes, quality, access, efficiency and equity, explains opinion polls that show increasing consensus of the notion of government intervention to secure more equitable access to essential health care.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr38/en/index.html
Primary Health Care – Now More Than Ever (148 page PDF):
http://www.who.int/whr/2008/whr08_en.pdf
The World Health Report 2008 provides a critical assessment of health care systems throughout the world. It describes how all nations, regardless of national wealth, can benefit by enacting reforms organized around primary health care.
In reading the various experiences of other nations, it is almost shocking to see how infrequently the most expensive health system of all, that of the United States, is mentioned as an example of how reform can work. But then it is understandable when other nations single our system out for its exceptionalism – a system with “singularly high additional private expenditure” that persistently underperforms “across domains of health outcomes, quality, access, efficiency and equity.”
For a proper perspective of what we do have and what we could have, this report should be required reading.