Primary Health Care: Questions and Answers
Küçük Resim Yok
Tarih
2021
Yazarlar
Dergi Başlığı
Dergi ISSN
Cilt Başlığı
Yayıncı
Turkish Medical Association
Erişim Hakkı
info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Özet
Primary health care (PHC), is a concept that concerns the general health services, a key to planning services, the first step of health care and a minimum health care package. Since the declaration formulated at the PHC Conference held in 1978 in Alma-Ata was signed and declared by all countries and relevant institutions it is therefore an international agreement. The principles in the Declaration are still valid. However, the political, social, economic, technological and scientific changes that took place in the years after the PHC Conference led to a decrease in the importance of many health problems and the emergence of new problems. For this reason, at the second PHC Conference held in Astana in 2018, 40 years after the aforementioned conference, some updates were made, although the principles in the Alma-Ata Declaration were based. In Turkey, almost all of the principles said in the PHC Declaration appeared in the Law for Socialized Health Services (No: 224) 17 years before the Alma-Ata meeting. Therefore, it should be admitted that PHC applications started long ago in our country. However, these practices unfortunately started to stall starting from the 1990s. Especially after the “health transformation” program and the “Pilot Law on Family Medicine” adopted in 2004, a regression was observed in most of these principles and in PHC practices. With this law, both primary and secondary health care facilities were run by private sector and contracted personnel; the patient referral system disappeared; applications to hospitals were encouraged; with a wage policy defined as the “performance system”, the principle that health services should be cheap and efficient was ignored, and health services became too expensive to overcome. The World Health Organization continues its efforts to maintain, strengthen and spread the understanding of primary health care. It is clear that this will be difficult. Because human beings are still struggling with wars, epidemics, lack of food, inequality, environmental pollution, uncontrolled industrial wastes, global climate change and managers who ignore all these situations, forget about people and prioritize money, not medicine, but trade. Our task as physicians and the responsibility imposed by our profession should be to cling to the principles of primary health care despite all these negativities. Our profession is a sacred profession that requires hope, optimism and effort. © 2021, Turkish Medical Association. All rights reserved.
Açıklama
Anahtar Kelimeler
Alma-Ata Declaration, Astana Declaration, Primary Care, Primary Health Care
Kaynak
Community and Physician
WoS Q Değeri
Scopus Q Değeri
N/A
Cilt
36
Sayı
1
