Primary health care encompasses the role of health care practitioners who deliver their services as the starting point of consultation for all patients within the health care system. The general practitioners and family physicians and the nursing staff assisting these practitioners are usually regarded as primary care providers. Health care system, according to the needs, aspirations and the economic affordability of the area as well as in view of the patient's desire might allow another health care professional such as a pharmacist, a nurse or a traditional medicine professional to proceed with his or her dispensation first. Moreover, seeing the condition of the ailing person he may further be referred for secondary or third opinion.
The term Primary care is mostly associated with the dispensers who deliver services locally in a given region. There are different means and modes of dispensation, for instance, Urgent care centers that deliver services to patients same day they report or on appointment basis.
Primary health care entails a broader spectrum of health care, addressing patients of varied backgrounds, e.g. all ages, different socioeconomic conditions, those requiring help with optimal health, and the patients with more or less chronic physical, mental and social health conditions. This implies that a primary care dispenser ought to possess a multiplicity in his faculties of the medical profession. Primary care requires its patients to strictly adhere to a sense of continuity during the course of their treatment for most of the times the patients need to see the same physician for day-to-day examination and advice wherein both the parties need to record the history of the initial treatment as part of the primary care. Some chronic ailments that are generally handled in primary care may enlist, for instance: back pain, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, depression or arthritis.
Primary care also encompasses an initial level mother-child health care, e.g. vaccination and family planning. In view of the worldwide population explosion, more and more number of aging adults are vulnerable to chronic non-contagious diseases; this has given considerable impetus on the demand for primary care across the globe both in developed and under developed countries. The WHO declares that the primary health care services ought to be a mandatory part of the overall health care strategy of a country.
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