The concept behind Primary Health Care is that every families in the community must have the essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technologies. The primary health care gives the instant help to the families by diagnosis of the problems or diseases and by providing the complete knowledge with proper consultation. The fact is that this process breaks the paradigm that high technology is the main solution and demystifies the role of the super expert. It would be necessary for the model to gain larger scale and this in theory should be the object of both the public and the private. Resource limitation is not a single factor that impairs the quality of care. On the contrary, today the third leading cause of death in the United States is medical errors and nonconformities, often the result of abuse and overuse of technology.
Along these lines is also a denser assessment of the role of hospitals themselves, which are expensive structures and should be reserved for the most severe cases, and a stimulus to practices outside these environments is crucial – which means less resources to install and maintain. Policies encouraging the practice of outpatient care with family doctors are an inevitable path in the search for a sustainable health system. This model has been implemented for years in the public system and is now being replicated in the field of supplementary health generating numerous benefits. The family doctor play a great role in providing the necessary health care for the families in case of any emergencies.
The continuous increase in health care spending, the rapid advance of new technologies, aging and the changing epidemiological profile of the population, coupled with limited financial resources, have led all international systems to review the care model to make it sustainable and without prejudice to patient safety. Among the many initiatives that have been taken, one with huge potential benefits, is the investment in primary health care and valuing the family doctor, a specialty with professionals, which has long stood out in the care of communities or in the official Family Health Strategy programs and is now becoming increasingly present in supplemental health tactics as part of investments in promotion, prevention and education.
In this model, multidisciplinary teams led by primary care physicians are responsible for coordinating the care of a group of patients, so that each beneficiary is always accompanied by the same professionals. This contributes to bonding and improves understanding of quality of life – prevention with a positive effect on health indicators. The family doctor is in a privileged situation to explain and recommend vaccines for those people, whether children, adults or the elderly who are at risk of contracting a disease, regardless of whether the vaccines are funded by the national health system, or on the contrary, they are acquired on behalf of people or patients. Therefore it will be an obligatory activity for the family doctor, so that later the well-informed people decide their own action.
