This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Family physicians must not ignore WHO initiative
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Family physicians — overlooked when WHO recently adopted The Declaration of Astana to help patients obtain universal access to health care, reduce instances of chronic disease and provide resources to achieve these objectives — cannot sit idle during Astana’s implementation, according to an editorial recently published in Annals of Family Medicine.
“The workload and challenging working circumstances that family physicians face is precisely why they need to concern themselves with Astana,” Chris van Weel, MD, PhD, told Healio Primary Care.
There are several actions family physicians need to take, Maria van den Muijsenbergh, MD, PhD, and van Weel of the department of primary and community care at Radboud University Medical Centre in The Netherlands wrote.
“This asks for transformation from medical care to intersectoral collaboration, and towards multidisciplinary teamwork to provide the necessary skills to address health problems in connection with social determinants of health” as well as “advocacy for comprehensive primary care for individuals and communities as the core function in health systems and the strengthening of its professionalism through teaching, training, research and practice development,” they wrote.
Family physicians must also speak up for themselves and their peers, according to van den Muijsenbergh, and van Weel.
“Most urgently we must amend what has been left out of the Astana declaration: engagement with policy makers and public health to detail the professional contribution of primary care,” they wrote, suggesting that primary care medical groups pool their resources to bring the amendment to reality.
The authors also discussed how WHO’s oversight of recognizing the contribution of family physicians has occurred before, when the agency also left family medicine professionals out of the Alma-Ata declaration, an earlier initiative that sought to obtain “good quality health care for all.”
“This lack of acknowledgment for the professionalism of family medicine clinicians is even more painful now than in 1978, given the strong development the field of family medicine has seen in these 40 years,” they wrote.
In an interview with Healio Primary Care, van Weel provided another impetus for family physicians to involve themselves in Astana, not distance themselves from it.
“This commitment of world leaders offers us a strong support to plead with our governments as well as health insurances for more time and money to spend with our patients to enable us to provide person-centered, population-oriented prevention and care, and for more medical education in this field, as well as for stronger collaboration between public health and primary health care,” van Weel told Healio Primary Care.
“If we achieve this transformation, we will be able to train and retain adequate numbers of family physicians with appropriate skill mix, able to work in a multidisciplinary context, in cooperation with nonprofessional community health workers to respond effectively to people’s health needs,” the editorial’s authors concluded. – by Janel Miller
Disclosures: Neither van den Muijsenbergh nor van Weel report any relevant financial disclosures.