Primary Health Care And Population Mortality 1st Richard Baker by Richard Baker 9781032409313, 9781032397375, 1032409312, 1032397373 instant download after payment.

It’s time to think differently about primary health care. As the evidence assembled in the following pages shows, it is crucial to the effect of health systems on population mortality. The research responsible for this new understanding of primary health care has been conducted in the last two decades and is so extensive that it has been possible to identify 23 mechanisms that contribute to its beneficial effects. Too often in the past, the policies of many governments and decision makers appear to have been based on the belief that primary health care is the setting for dealing with minor problems and the routine management of chronic disorders, with the overriding objective being to constrain the use of costly hospital services. The consequence of this narrow understanding of primary health care is shorter lives for too many people. The new evidence demands that policymakers should be much more ambitious about the role of primary health care in health systems. Better planned and better resourced services would be followed by fewer premature deaths among current and future generations.
The planning and delivery of primary health care must give greater priority to reducing mortality and inequality in mortality. The mechanisms of primary health care that influence mortality should be used by policymakers to inform the organisation of services. Methods are available for monitoring mortality patterns, and mortality should be one of the key outcomes routinely used to guide services. Practitioners need a supportive policy framework that allows them to learn from both mortality in the populations they care for and the deaths of individuals.