The Contribution of Primary Care Systems to Health Outcomes and Costs

I am a strong advocate of primary care. Agreeing with Yahaira, fostering a strong relationship with your PCP is pertinent to your overall health. By seeing a PCP consistently, different aspects of health (physical, social, mental, and emotional) can be more easily monitored. Taking a more holistic approach to medicine, we would hope for more health individuals, thus a more healthy and productive society.

As argued in this week's reading(http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=12822915), primary care has been shown to have a positive influence on health costs, appropriateness of care, and outcomes for the most common medical problems. Many countries have strengthened their primary care systems in an effort to control costs by using primary care as a gatekeeping system. These efforts have proved successful in some countries in lowering health care costs. But despite being organized and adequately funded, it is important to ensure that a primary care system in a country is also equitable and quality care to the population. While I'm a big proponent of a strong primary care system in the US, I believe there is definitely need for improvement in affordability, access, and equity of care.

At the same time, it is also important for the US to consider ethical implications when recruiting primary care physicians. I found the reading on the recruitment of physicians from developing countries to the primary care supply in the US a topic for debate(http://www.annfammed.org/cgi/content/full/5/6/486). Not only should the US be concerned about the health of their own population, but they do have an ethical obligation to not contribute to the health deprivation in poorer countries by becoming dependent on foreign physicians. This issue must also be addressed when looking to improve the primary care system in the US.