Primary Health Care

Question 1

What are some features of the new International Economic Order?

Answer 1

1. Developing countries must be entitled to regulate and control the activities of multinational corporations operating within their territory.
2. They must be free to nationalize or expropriate foreign property on conditions favourable to them.
3. They must be free to set up associations of primary commodities producers similar to the OPEC; all other States must recognize this right and refrain from taking economic, military, or political measures calculated to restrict it.
4. International trade should be based on the need to ensure stable, equitable, and remunerative prices for raw materials, generalized non-reciprocal and non-discriminatory tariff preferences, as well as transfer of technology to developing countries; and should provide economic and technical assistance without any strings attached.

Question 2

What are some basic ideas behind primary health care?

Answer 2

• Change in the way countries relate to each other (giving developing countries more control);
• Change in the power structures within countries;
• Change in the power relationships within health services (giving normal people more control)
  PLUS:
• Underlying values rather than technologies

Question 3

Why has primary health care not taken off?

Answer 3

Primary Health care has not really taken off for the following reasons:

• The powerful countries moved to the right
• The ‘Bretton Woods Institutions’ got involved in health
• The health professionals did not like it
  
  • When we worked with the peasants in the villages it was easy – they were just sleeping. When they awoke they realised what they could achieve. But the doctors in the big hospitals were just pretending to be sleeping. It is not easy to wake up someone who is pretending to be sleeping.

Question 4

What is selective primary health care?

Answer 4

Primary Health care includes at least:

1. education concerning prevailing health problems and the methods of preventing and controlling them;
2. promotion of food supply and proper nutrition;
3. an adequate supply of safe water and basic sanitation;
4. maternal and child health care, including family planning;
5. immunization against the major infectious diseases;
6. prevention and control of locally endemic diseases;
7. appropriate treatment of common diseases and injuries; and
8. provision of essential drugs.

Question 5

What is GOBI-FFF?

Answer 5

• Growth monitoring
• Oral Rehydration Solution
• Breast feeding
• Immunisation
• Female education
• Family planning/spacing
• Food supplementation

Question 6

What are some primary health care that are in practice today?

Answer 6

• Most developing country health services represent an uneasy compromise between vertical and horizontal, centralised and decentralised, public and private, hospitals and preventive services.
• Central hospitals and urban services still consume far more than their share of meagre resources.
• The essential concepts behind Primary Health Care are still sound, but rarely understood or implemented…