Building and Sustaining a Robust Primary Health Care System: Lessons from Country Experiences

Primary health care has been long acknowledged as the fundamental pillar of any health system, and a key instrument for achieving efficient, equitable, and universal health care. While accepting the significance of primary health care to be sacrosanct, little recognition is often accorded to the systemic prerequisites of a strong primary health care system, even as efforts to expand and/or strengthen primary care continue fervently. An attempt has been made in this paper to identify such prerequisites through a review of notable country examples and their present and past experiences. These pertain not just to the health sector but also straddle multiple important social, economic, and political dimensions.