16/08/2025
🌍 Community Health Educative Series
📖 Course: Primary Health Care (PHC)
🔹 Introduction
Primary Health Care (PHC) is the bedrock of every health system. It provides essential healthcare that is accessible, affordable, and acceptable to individuals, families, and communities.
It is not limited to treating sickness but also focuses on prevention, health promotion, treatment, and rehabilitation. PHC is community-oriented and ensures that everyone—rich or poor, rural or urban—has the right to basic healthcare.
The concept of PHC was globally recognized in 1978 at Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, during the International Conference on Primary Health Care. The famous declaration emphasized “Health for All by the Year 2000”, which remains a guiding principle for health systems today.
🔹 Course Outline of PHC
Throughout this PHC series, we shall cover:
1. Definition and Concept of PHC
2. Historical Background of PHC
3. The Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978
4. Principles of PHC
5. Elements of PHC
6. Levels of Health Care
7. Strategies for Implementing PHC
8. Challenges of PHC in Nigeria
9. PHC and the Role of Community Health Workers
10. Relevance of PHC to Community Development
🔹 Session 1: Definition and Concept of PHC
📖 Definition:
Primary Health Care (PHC) is essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound, and socially acceptable methods and technology, made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation, and at a cost that the community and country can afford.
💡 In simple terms:
PHC is about taking healthcare to the people in their homes and communities, not waiting for them to come to the hospital.
It is the first level of contact between people and the national health system.
⚖️ Core Concept:
Health care must be equitable – everyone should benefit.
Communities must participate actively in their own health.
Services must be affordable and acceptable.
💬 Discussion Time:
👉 What comes to your mind first when you hear Primary Health Care?
(Please drop your thoughts, views, or questions in the comment section ⬇️ so we can learn together.)