Vital Signs Profiles

The Vital Signs Profile is one of the flagship products that came out of the work of the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative. Before the Vital Signs Profile, PHCPI’s earliest efforts focused on mapping elements of strong primary health care into a conceptual framework and identifying existing globally comparable data sources to measure those elements. The Vital Signs Profile was created to take this work a step further. By compiling and analyzing data from multiple quantitative and qualitative sources, and visualizing this information in an actionable, useful way, the Vital Signs Profile offers countries a rich and nuanced snapshot of primary health care in their health system.

Each Vital Signs Profile Provides answers to some of the most critical questions about a country's primary health care system:

  • Financing: How much does your government spend on primary health care?
  • Capacity: Does your system have the policies, infrastructure and other physical and human resources required to deliver primary health care?
  • Performance: Does your primary health care system deliver quality care that meets people's health needs?
  • Equity: Does your primary health care system effectively serve the most marginalized and disadvantaged groups in society?

 

PHCPI and several “Trailblazer” countries partnered to develop and release the first set of Vital Signs Profiles in October 2018. We found that the process of developing the first set of Vital Signs Profiles helped to unearth rich and diverse data sources in countries, and unite country stakeholders around a common agenda of primary health care measurement for improvement. Find Vital Signs Profiles for PHCPI’s Trailblazer countries on the Explore Country Data page. 

To help turn Vital Signs Profile insights into action toward primary health care improvement, PHCPI has developed the PHC Improvement Strategies – a set of tools and resources that countries can use to identify specific ways to strengthen their primary health care systems. 

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