AAFP’s (American Academy of Family Physicians’) recent statement, “sound investments in the nation’s primary care infrastructure, is the only sure way to improve health care quality while reducing health care costs”, and “that patients get high-quality care at less cost when their health care system is based on primary medical care.”highlighted the importance of primary health care system.

The president of AAFP Mr. Goertz suggested that if one wants to restrain the budget of health care, more focus should be laid on family physicians and primary health workforce.

At a lower cost high quality care can be made easily accessible to the patients, if we improve our current health care system by focussing  more on primary health care to make it more efficient and achieving a balance between the primary health care and non primary health care.

It is time that we in India started taking the shortage of MBBS qualified family physicians very seriously and took some concrete steps to counter the chaos that reigns in the healthcare scenario in India. Imagine Indians depending only on self medication and hospitals!

Read more: http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/publications/news/news-now/government-medicine/20110414goertzonbudget.html