Realising the Potential of Primary Health Care
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The rapid spread of COVID-19 added urgency to the need to address long-standing pressures on health systems, linked to growing citizens’ expectations, population ageing and more complex and costly health care needs. As the first point of contact, primary health care that provides comprehensive, continuous, and co-ordinated care is key to boosting preventive care, treating those who need care, and helping people become more active in managing their own health. It has the potential to improve health system efficiency and health outcomes for people across socio-economic levels, and make health systems people-centred. This report examines primary health care across OECD countries before the COVID-19 pandemic, and draws attention to how primary health care is not living up to its full potential. Doing things differently – through new models of organising services, better co-ordination among providers, better use of digital technology, and better use of resources and incentives – helps to improve care, reduce the need for hospitalisations, and mitigate health inequalities. This report identifies key policy challenges that OECD countries need to address to realise the full potential of primary health care, and reviews progress and innovations towards transforming primary health care.
Key findings
This chapter provides an overview of the publication Realising the Potential of Primary Health Care, as well as summarising the main findings. The chapter starts by presenting the evidence base that associates strong primary health care with more efficient, effective and equitable health care systems. The second section shows that primary health care is currently failing to deliver its full potential in many OECD countries, hampered by avoidable hospital admissions, inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions, insufficient preventive care or shortcomings in co‑ordination. The third section identifies policy levers to tackle these challenges, and provides an overview of the report’s findings on how primary health care could provide more efficient, effective and equitable care. The concluding section presents a summary table of the key policy ingredients that countries will need to address to realise the full potential of primary health care.
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