The visibility bias of Primary Care
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20318/recs.2025.8876Keywords:
Primary Health Care, invisibility, valorization, appraisal, hospital-centrism, communications mediaAbstract
Despite the immense strengths of Primary Care (PC) and Family and Community Medicine (FCM) as health investment strategies, there is a social invisibilization surrounding them. The invisibility of PC is basically due to: 1/ the invisibility of promotion and prevention, and of quaternary prevention; 2/ the hospital-centrism of teaching, care, management, politics, research and the media, and 3/ its “media invisibility”. These threats are analyzed, and solutions are proposed such as reversing the hospital-centrism teaching model, starting with the addition of FCM as a core element in medical schools; abandoning the terms primary care physician or general practitioner, since the official term has been family doctor since 1998; recognizing the work performed by PC teams and family doctors in their capacity to resolve the most prevalent health problems; adequately funding PC, improving human resource planning; enhancing the organization and internal management of PC teams; redirecting research towards biopsychosocial, community, digital aspects, etc. And commit to structuring external assessment and the role of the media.
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