Primary Care

There is no doubt that an effective and concrete health care system needs to have a strong primary care system. Starfield states that "primary care is the crucial foundation of a health care system" in her book entitled "Primary care: balancing health needs, services, and technology." From the articles in the reading for this week as well as many other studies conducted on the effectiveness of primary care, the same conclusion is reached: health care systems that have a strong primary care system foster healthier patients, ultimately leading to a lower mortality rate and overall higher life expectancy. I would advocate for a 50-30-20 breakdown of primary care, specialty services, and hospital services, respectively. Having the majority of our health care system focused on primary care will allow patients to become more proactive about their own health. I also think that primary care physicians should also include preventive care in their services, which will aide in reducing unnecessary health care costs. With a constant and effective primary care system, patients will be healthier overall, which will then reduce the use of specialty care services. As others have previously stated, it is important to increase the "attractiveness" of becoming a primary care physician so more medical students go into general practice. With most of medical school graduates going into specialty care, there are not enough doctors to become primary care physicians--which is the first pitfall of the US primary health care system. In order to counter this problem, there should be some kind of incentive to become a general practitioner. On the other hand, because developed countries face more chronic disease, specialty care is also very crucial to the overall health care system, which is I believe that 30% of health care should be focused on it. In conclusion, primary care provides the backbone of a country's health care sytem and without it, the health of the people is taken care of by doctors that barely know patients. When a patient has a primary care physician that he/she sees regularly, the patient tends to be more healthier and if disease does arise, it is usually caught very early on--and if needed, the PCP can direct their patient to a specialist. A strong communication between the PCP and specialist is also important because the PCP has the patient's medical history (including previous treatments, allergies, etc) which can help prevent any medical mistakes. The US health care system definately needs major reform, especially in the realm of its primary health care. However, many citizens do not like the idea of a PCP or gate-keeper and it is our duty, as public health professionals, to help change the way the people of the US think about health care.