Strengthening Primary Health Care

• New HSAN sub-committeesJul 01, 2008
• Financing Primary Health CareJun 06, 2008
• Diagonal Approach to Global Health FinancingApr 10, 2008

“15by2015” quality health care for all 

Primary health care and prevention are the best and most affordable ways to save the most lives and improve overall health.

With the “15by2015” campaign we ask that donor organizations allocate 15% of their vertical funding towards sustainable comprehensive primary health care that is accessible and affordable in all regions of the world.

Quality health care for all

The eight millennium development goals form a blueprint agreed upon by all the countries and leading developmental organizations worldwide to make unprecedented efforts, meeting the needs of the world’s poorest by the target date of 2015. Improvement of health and thereby improvement of health care is one of the objectives in these eight goals.

With the campaign “15by2015” we want to specifically target health care and make you and all influencing stakeholders aware of an adequate strategy to improve health care. Quality health care--accessible and affordable--is a right for all; most everybody agrees on this, but the way to reach this is not always clear.

The present situation of health care aid

The positive news is that financial support to improve health care in developing countries has increased seriously in the last years, about 26% between 1997 and 2002 (from US$6.4 billion to US$8.1 billion). However, the vast majority of this aid was allocated to disease specific projects (vertical programs) rather than to broad-based investments (horizontal programs) such as primary health care services. Vertical programs improve health care, but only for small groups of people with specific diseases. Some people receive good care, others remain untreated because there are no doctors, nurses or medication available.

Furthermore, salaries of health care providers working for donor-funded vertical programs are often two to four times that of equally trained government workers in primary health care. This induces an internal brain-drain (loss of well-trained people where they are most needed) where local health care workers move from their work in health centres and hospitals to the better paid projects of donor organizations.

What is “15by2015”?

“15 by 2015” is a campaign calling for all major global health donors to allocate 15% of all their grants towards strengthening the primary health care system of the country they are working in. The target date is the same as with the globally known and used eight millennium development goals, 2015.

Why “15by2015”?

Primary health care cuts across diseases in a systemic way. Investing in improving the quality of primary health care (infrastructure, human resources and equipment) is a broad-based and sustainable investment that should be accessible and affordable for all. For example, if good primary health care were available in the 42 countries accounting for about 90% of child deaths worldwide, 63% of these deaths could be prevented. The most prevalent health care problems in developing countries are respiratory illnesses, diarrhoea and complications of labour and delivery. These can and must be treated within the same primary health care framework that deals with diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS.

Please sign our petition in support of improving the primary health care around the world.