Primary Health Care (phc): Back to the Past?

• Main Author: Alvaro Franco-Giraldo
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad de Antioquia 2012-04-01
• Series: Revista Facultad Nacional de Salud Pública
• Subjects: primary care; health; health systems.
• Online Access: http://aprendeenlinea.udea.edu.co/revistas/index.php/fnsp/article/view/7630/10914

Primary health care is analyzed as the alternative throughwhich health systems will recover the role they had during thelate twentieth century: working with other sectors to implementhealth promotion actions to improve the users’ quality of lifeand equity. A renewal is presented in recognition of the effortsduring the final century to establish primary care policies andprograms as the core of the health systems, emphasizing thereorientation of health services. This paper discusses the principles and methods establishedby the new proposal for primary health care. This renewalproposal raises expectations regarding its return to the past,not only as a strategy but also because it raises hopes at a timeof global crisis whose impact on health services is evident.The first question posed here is: Is there really a renewal?The discussion focuses on the following topics: phc and thedeterioration of health indicators in many areas in the world,social inequalities and health inequities, the weaknesses inthe declarations of Alma Ata understood as “medicine forthe poor,” the renewal of phc as opposed to the critical healthstatus in countries and the opposing progress of the neoliberalglobalization, phc and the political conceptions of the Right,phc and the reform to the reform of the health systems;coordination of phc with health promotion and public health,the changes in the contexts and the new economic crisis in thisglobal event. The paper concludes with a call to revitalize theprocesses of the health systems from a political standpoint, andto rethink the sanitary reforms of the health systems basing thereasoning on primary health care, which is the focus of theirtransformation.