PRIMARY HEALTH CARE

Primary Health Care

Primary Health Care

Introduction

The aim of this assignment is to analyse health, health needs and how primary health care evolved. In this assignment an Assistant Practitioner will discuss the introduction of primary health care and the effectiveness of the Paediatric Learning Disability team in relation to the vision for the primary and community health care. How the service came about will be discussed and its strengths and weaknesses. For those children and young people who suffer social exclusion due to their behaviour or lack of skills and abilities, we provide the Community Access Service with support through our Burnley office.

Define Health

One of the main reasons for trying to clarify the meaning of health is so we can assess the health of individuals and populations. The obvious problem is that different people have different ideas of what health is. Someone who has a disease may feel they are healthy in the sense that they don't feel ill or that they are enjoying personal well-being. It is possible to generate countless examples in which people can be judged as healthy or unhealthy. The World Health Organisation (1948) defines health as ' A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity'.

Health means more than an absence of disease it's a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being , health is a vital issue for human ,there for its protection and promotion must be considered in their widest sense because it depends on the continued availability of environment resources and on the completion of environment .In recent years , environmental problems have acquired new dimensions .Unless the protection of human health we will die out in addition of losing our world, the maintenance and improvement of health should be at the centre of concern about the environment and development . In fact, the most immediate problems in the world are ill health and premature death caused by pollution or biological agents in the environment's resources for example water, air, soil, and food.

Health needs

Given a strong economy and healthy public finances, the UK Government in 2000 pledged that 'over time we aim to bring [NHS spending] up to the European Union average' - an acceptance that the NHS, however efficient, was slipping behind the standards of comparable countries and that funding was an issue. The World Health Organization's report in May 2000 ranked France 1st in the world for overall health system performance, and the UK 18th.Alongside the PSA, The NHS Plan sets out the totality of the NHS reform programme from which these targets were taken. In many ways, The NHS Plan is less a plan than a sequel to the 1997 NHS policy White Paper. It revisits the problems of the NHS, the options for funding healthcare and the Government's vision of a publicly funded health service designed around the patient. (Audit Commission 2002: 15-20)

It benefits from a more open ...