Health systems founded on strong primary health care are essential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and universal health coverage. Authors on behalf of the World Organization of Family Doctors' (WONCA) executive committee discuss the need for global primary care development indicators to strengthen primary health care systems. They call on the UN and other stakeholders to commit to the measurement and development of high-quality and comprehensive primary care. 

Recent crises, including the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, have been wake-up calls: too many primary health care systems are under-resourced and fragmented, leaving countries unprepared to reach everyone with needed health services. Read more for a call to action from leadership of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank Group, and the World Health Organization on the need for better measurement to guide meaningful improvements in primary health care systems.

The global health agenda has often suffered from fragmentation, taking a siloed approach to particular diseases and interventions. During the Ebola crisis, we saw that underfunded, fragmented and understaffed health systems can be quickly overwhelmed, allowing an outbreak to escalate into an epidemic. Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children International, shares insight into building strong health systems so that all can have access to high-quality health care.

Since the 1990s, Ghana has taken siginificant steps to improve primary health care, including launching the Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) program and ensuring financial access through the National Health Insurance Scheme. President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana joins fellow heads of state in signing the global framework for sustainable development and urges increased attention to strengthening health systems and enhancing the ability to respond to global health threats.

On September 26, 2015 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank Group, and the World Health Organization launched a collaboration to strengthen primary health care and advance progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

With the launch of the new Sustainable Development Goals, health and development experts around the world are reflecting on what it will take to accomplish them. As a global community, this is a unique opportunity to think carefully about what works and what doesn’t, and to use the new goals to redouble our efforts to support programmes, solutions, and systems that work. Suzanne Ehlers, President and CEO of Population Action International, and Rosemary Mburu, Executive Director of World AIDS Campaign International, weigh in on the value of high-performing primary health care systems and call on country decision-makers to enact policies and budgets that lead to measureable improvements in primary health care.

To address the challenge of weak primary health care systems in low- and middle-income countries, members of the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage (JLN) Primary Health Care technical initiative have co-developed a diagnostic UHC Primary Health Care Self-Assessment Tool, a multi-stakeholder survey to help countries assess whether their health financing approaches are well aligned with primary care initiatives, efforts, and programs. Read on to learn more about the tool and discover highlights from early pilots in Malaysia, Ghana, Indonesia, and India.

What makes primary health care work? How can systems better function as a whole? Atul Gawande and Chris Elias speak with Devex about the challenges primary health care leaders face around the world, and how PHCPI is digging deep to understand these difficult questions.

Last month, world leaders came together to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)--a new global development agenda that sets ambitious targets, such as eliminate poverty, achieve gender equality and end hunger globally. Following the launch of the SDGs, World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) President Michael Kidd weighs in on the potential of primary health care systems to support the achievement of the health-related SDG and deliver quality health care to populations worldwide. He also proposes new indicators that, if comprehensively measured, can show us the strength of primary health care in countries around the world and help us understand how to further improve our systems.

For the hundreds of thousands of women and newborns who die during pregnancy or delivery each year across Africa, the underlying cause of death is a fundamental lack of access to basic health care. In this op-ed originally published in AllAfrica, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlights how primary health care and better data can help improve access to quality health care for women and their newborns.

Imagine traveling an hour to reach a health facility, only to realize that no doctors are there. Or taking medication for a month, to later find out that you received the wrong diagnosis. Imagine being a doctor at a clinic so busy you see over 40 patients a day, and aren't able to give each one the full attention they need. Good health workers are the cornerstone to strong health systems. PHCPI investigates how we can better understand what makes health care providers most effective for the patients they serve. 

What is a young mother looking for when seeking health care for her child, her elderly father or herself? Quality primary health care. Quality can drive the necessary convergence of the current global dialogue on universal health coverage (UHC) and primary health care (PHC), as a sharp entry point to catalyzing change at the frontline of service delivery. In this blog, Dr. Shams Syed of the World Health Organization reflects on the need for action to support countries in utilizing PHC performance as a key driver in achieving universal health coverage.

When you go to a health facility, are you able to see the same doctor or nurse as the last time you visited? If you see a specialist, do they use information from your primary care doctor to inform your diagnosis and treatment? Are you referred to a higher-level facility, if necessary, for follow-up care? For some of us, the answer is yes. But for too many of us, the answer is no. Read on to find out why continuity of care is a critically important, but poorly understood, role of PHC systems.

Commemerating the recent second annual UHC day, read on to understand how the UHC movement evolved from a nascent movement to a global force over the course of a few short years and learn why high-quality PHC is one of the best bets for achieving UHC goals.

On February 1st, the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Zika virus a public health emergency. The declaration was the WHO's highest level of warning--so dire, in fact, that it has only been declared three times in the organization's history. Susanne Ehlers, President and CEO of PAI, weighs in on the importance of robust and universal primary health care services in preventing, identifying, managing, and treating outbreaks of infectious disease.

Universal Health Coverage has been a priority in Nigeria since 2000, but it was really the National Health Policy of 2006 and the National Strategy Development Plan of 2010-2015 that elevated the need for UHC in Nigeria. Still, despite both these documents, not much progress towards UHC had been made until former President, Goodluck Jonathan, passed a declaration that called health a fundamental right and the responsibility of the government.

Why is it important for countries to track and understand primary health care spending? Read on as Federica Secci, Health Specialist at the World Bank Group, discusses how accurate primary health care spending data is critical to improving systems and meeting Universal Health Coverage goals. 

Since 2009 the Community of Practice Health Service Delivery under Harmonization for Health in Africa (HHA) has grown to more than 1,400 members from 78 countries. Over the past seven years, the community focused on building a network of district health management teams that values and prioritizes information sharing and learning through a horizontal learning environment. A recent test of fast learning cycles in Guinea and Benin revealed the role of the community in enabling peer-to-peer communication and information exhange among disparate groups. Read on for deeper insights from the Community of Practice Health Service Delivery into lessons learned on starting a scaling a successful global network. 

As countries around the globe grapple with aging populations, a rising burden on non-communicable diseases, and the omnipresent risk of outbreaks, developing people-centered, integrated health systems with primary care at their core becomes ever more essential. An analysis of 22 successful reforms reveal eight characteristics of successful primary health care reforms that countries can adopt to address their specific strengths, needs, and challenges. These tenets comprise a valuable framework for understanding the characteristics of high-performing middle and high-income country primary health care systems.

Ghana created the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative in 1994 to aim of reducing barriers to geographic access to primary health care. Read on to learn about the critical success factors of the program--community engagement and participation--and practical guidance for implementation.

This piece was originally published on Crossing the Divide, a Medium blog.

The PHCPI partnership recently published an article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine underscoring why primary health care is essential to building strong health systems. The article gives insights into the core quality functions of primary health care, and provides a framework for understanding primary health care system performance.

Read on as Results for Development's Gina Lagomarsino explains why primary health care is the cheapest, fastests, most efficient way to achieve Universal Health Coverage.

The Ariadne Labs Primary Health Care team has been working with countries around the world on how to improve primary health care, a cornerstone of achieving universal health coverage.

As someone who has worked to strengthen health systems for more than 20 years, I’ve heard (and even made) a lot of arguments about whether one intervention versus another is more important or a better value for money.

The JLN Primary Health Care Improvement Collaborative met in Kigali, Rwanda to outline strategies to address priority measurement areas and work towards the creation of a practical measurement toolkit.

Public-private partnerships may help overcome barriers to access, strengthen capacity and build resiliance.

In light of National Cancer Day on April 1, 2017, PHCPI reflects on the central role of primary care in cancer screening and treatment.

In November 2016, Qualis Health, a Seattle-based nonprofit population health organization, convened a symposium titled “Primary Care in the United States: Lessons Learned to Inform Global Efforts to Improve Primary Care” at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters. Sixteen experts from across the U.S. shared examples of healthcare delivery that illustrate high-functioning primary care, and described system innovations for improved care, better population health, and effective healthcare spending. Read—and watch—to see what lessons pockets of excellence in U.S. primary health care can inspire around the world.

Ariadne Labs is developing a Primary Health Care Measurement and Implementation Research Consortium. This Consortium will bring together researchers and policy makers from multiple disciplines representing academic institutions, government agencies, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations to accelerate progress in primary health care (PHC) research in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). We are issuing a request for proposals (RFP) to develop a report on the gaps in measurement and improvement and approaches to address these knowledge gaps in one of four areas critical to effective PHC in these settings.

Jishnu Das, Lead Economist at the Development Research Group at the World Bank, recently wrote a letter to Oxfam encouraging a reframing of the questions about quality of PHC services in the private sector. 

PHCPI has developed a series of case studies across five countries demonstrating innovations in how data is being used to strengthen primary health care and accelerate progress towards universal health coverage.