Assessing Your Needs (continued)

Why Primary Healthcare?

Primary care is the first line of defense for individuals looking to take care of their health and ensure their continued wellbeing. The goal of primary care is to catch, treat, or even reverse small problems before they become big ones. This is done through a combination of regular clinical check ups, periodic screening tests, and patient education and outreach. Primary care is proactive rather than reactive, which makes sense on individual, community, and national levels because it can effectively reduce mortality and morbidity, as well as make better use of scarce funding and resources. In the nations of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the shift to primary care reflects a marked departure from a system that relied heavily on more costly secondary and tertiary, or hospital-based care.

With this in mind, AIHA’s community-based primary healthcare model mobilizes various sectors of the community to assess local needs and available resources then sets priorities for targeting the health-related issues of greatest concern to the population. As a result, AIHA partnership-established Primary Healthcare Centers offer a combination of traditional and specialty care services that meet the unique needs of people within the community.

Gaining Governmental Support Is Key

As you begin the assessment process, be sure to enlist governmental support at the onset to establish a solid foundation and the on-going support you will need to ensure your project’s sustainability.

Governmental support at the national, regional, and local level in particular is essential for implementing a primary healthcare services delivery model with the necessary legal status and government sanction to ensure its acceptability, sustainability, and potential for replication at other sites. Support is also needed to establish a framework for training and retraining skilled primary care and/or family medicine professionals, as well as for continuing clinical education. Governmental support can be gained in a number of ways: through open discussion of initial goals and objectives; by developing a common vision; by enlisting officials as members on your Community Advisory Board; and by holding regular meetings to inform stakeholders on program progress, challenges, and accomplishments.

AIHA’s Assessment Process

The assessments AIHA conducted in conjunction with community partners in nations of the former Soviet Union involved both forming Community Advisory Boards and creating community questionnaires. Below is more information about these assessment processes.

Continue reading about the Assessment process.