One of the key points of the recently presented health reform is the primary carebecause it is not a secret that it has been one of the most striking concepts of the president’s proposal Gustavo Petro.
With primary care centers, It seeks to standardize in a deeper and broader way the scope of the Colombian health system for the entire population, as well as to have a more personalized attention.
“Primary health care is not a health system, it is a care model; It is a modality to serve the population”, explained the former health minister Augusto Galán for Portafolio.
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In addition, This proposed model seeks to provide complete care to each patientthat is, it is not limited to general medicine appointments or medical check-ups: “Part of primary care is that people tend to confuse it with simply basic care in a clinic, and it is much more than that, because it interrelates the social determinants of health and tries to integrate collective health with individual health.”, added the former minister.
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Nevertheless, The primary care model, as it is proposed in the health reform, is not immune to challengesas stated by the professor at the Universidad del Rosario Paul Rodríguez Lesmes.
“The main challenge for the implementation of the model is to build from scratch. There are a lot of exercises and laws that have already been formulated, plans at the territorial level that have been developed, and it seems that the law seeks to largely erase this collective learning and replace it with a new instance.”.
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The teacher was emphatic in assuring that the way in which primary care is raised may be ignoring the efforts and processes that have been taking place in different territorial entities, such as Bogotá, where Petro, in his position as mayor, tried to implement it at the district level.
“Rebuilding an institutional framework for intersectoral governance is complicated, because it is not only a matter of having brigades or similar ones that already exist, but also connecting with the other functions of the executive at the regional level, and for this reason, starting from scratch is very difficult. I think that is the main problem of getting to implement it, because it almost makes us forget about the National Health Plans to build something as if nothing existed”, he added.
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