Revitalising Health for All: Scaling Up/Learning from Comprehensive Primary Health Care Experiences

There have been numerous programs attempting to put Comprehensive Primary Health Care (CPHC) into practice at local, regional and national levels. Too often, however, the evaluation and lessons from CPHC experiences have been converted into ‘selected interventions’ that need to be ‘scaled-up,’ with too little attention given to the importance of the local context within which CPHC efforts take place.

 We intend our project to fill this ‘contextual’ gap in knowledge, by bringing together practitioners, researchers and research users to document more fully CPHC lessons from the past, and to research in rigorous and comprehensive ways CPHC activities in the present.  

Our project objectives and planned activities are as follows:

1. Develop a common framework for describing and evaluating the impact of CPHC (Year 1).
2. Undertake a rigorous retrospective assessment of publicly available materials describing the features and experience of CPHC programs in partnering countries/regions (Year 1).
3. Train a cohort of junior/mid-level researcher activists (university or CSO-based) partnered with research users (practitioners, policy-makers) in participating countries/regions (Years 2, 3 and 4).
4. Initiate and support a program of participant action research on critical issues facing Comprehensive Primary Health Care development and sustainability.
5. Build links between researchers and research users and pioneer strategies for ensuring that ongoing research is relevant, responsive and accessible to various research users.  This will be accomplished by convening regional meetings that involve the partner groups and other key researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and civil society organizations. These meetings will take place in Years 2 and 3, alongside the training events.
6. Develop a sustainable infrastructure (based on IPHU) within the PHM for capacity building in CPHC development, including research capacity.  The purpose of the training programs and regional meetings is to build a stronger network to sustain activities beyond the limited period of the Teasdale-Corti grant.
7. Strengthen across the People’s Health Movement familiarity and skills in participatory action research and links with networks of researchers and research users.  A final international colloquium is planned for the end of Year 4 to bring together all that has been learned to that point in time.
8. Evaluate the impact of the entire program on CPHC in partnering countries regions.