Can the Astana Declaration Be a Turning Point to Finally Ensuring Primary Health Care for All?

November 02, 2018These three factors will be critical.Fellow delegates to last week ’s ​Global Conference on Primary Health Care in Astana, Kazakhstan, have flown home to an awesome yet daunting challenge: 40 years after the landmark Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978 declaring health as a human right, how can we finally make the declaration’s vision of primary health care (PHC) for all a reality?The monumental 1978 conference in Alma-Ata, USSR  (now Almaty, Kazakhstan), pronounced for the first time global agreement that health is a “fundamental human right” and called for “urgent and effective national and international action to develop and implement primary health care throughout the world.”  We ’ve come a long way, but are far from reaching the dream.Representatives from  134 countries broke across political and ideological differences, personally urged on by the likes of the late US Senator Ted Kennedy, and set a target to achieve PHC for all by 2000.Forty years later we ’ve come a long way, but are far from reaching the dream hatched in Alma-Ata.Last Thursday,  1,200 delegates from more than 120 countries renewed the commitment to PHC for all with the Astana Declaration. More than 180 civil society organizations, including the  Frontline Health Workers Coalition,  through the UHC2030 Civil Society Engagement Mechanism signalled our intent to see PHC for all finally realized and what it will take to get us there.Here are three factors I believ...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: news