Community and Primary Care
Summary
Community and primary care form the foundation of effective health systems by providing first‐contact, accessible, continuous and comprehensive services close to where people live and work. Primary care addresses a broad spectrum of needs: health promotion, disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative support. By linking individuals with multidisciplinary teams—including general practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals and public health practitioners—primary care manages multimorbidity, coordinates referrals to specialists and integrates social, economic and environmental determinants of health into everyday practice. Community engagement empowers people to articulate their own priorities, participate in service design and adopt health-protective behaviours. Strong primary and community care systems foster equity and resilience, improve health outcomes at lower cost than hospital‐based approaches and underpin universal health coverage. Historical milestones—from the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration through to the 2018 Astana Declaration—have repeatedly affirmed the need for person-centred, community-owned and intersectoral approaches. In today’s context of ageing populations, rising chronic disease burdens and emerging infectious threats, investing in community and primary care remains essential both to avert unnecessary hospital admissions and to deliver sustainable, people-focused health for all.
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Community and Primary Care publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in community and primary care across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Primary health care: A person-centred approach to health services that provides first-contact, accessible, continuous and comprehensive care close to communities.
Universal health coverage (UHC): Ensuring that all individuals receive the health services they need without suffering financial hardship.
Integrated health services: Coordination of care across disciplines and levels—community, primary, secondary and tertiary—to meet population and individual needs.
Social determinants of health: The conditions in which people are born, live, work and age that influence health risks and outcomes.
Health in all policies: A collaborative policy strategy across sectors to address health impacts of social, economic and environmental decisions.
References
- Community pharmacy-delivered interventions for public health priorities: a systematic review of interventions for alcohol reduction, smoking cessation and weight management, including meta-analysis for smoking cessation. BMJ Open (2016).
- Evaluation of Frequency of Encounters With Primary Care Physicians vs Visits to Community Pharmacies Among Medicare Beneficiaries. JAMA Network Open (2020).
- Establishing Community-Based Primary Health Care.
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