Primary care, with its focus on both individuals and communities, could play a key role in addressing health inequities that have been exposed and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the United States’s chronic underinvestment in primary care currently limits its ability to reduce health disparities. In this new article, Rodriguez et al apply a health equity lens to the five recommendations put forward in the 2021 National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine report, “ Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care, ” in hopes of advancing health equity by placing high-quality primary care at its center. The authors offer their perspectives, as well as strategies on how to operationalize NASEM’s five recommendations regarding the following: 1) Paying teams to care for people, not individual doctors; 2) Ensuring high-quality care is available to everyone in every community; 3) Training primary care teams where people live and work; 3) Designing information technology that serves patients, families and interprofessional care teams; and 5) Ensuring that high-quality primary care is successfully implemented.
“As we move towards the next stages of primary care reform, having a health-equity informed public policy will be key to reduce and eliminate existing health inequities and ensure provision of high-quality primary care,” the authors write.
Implementing High-Quality Primary Care Through a Health Equity Lens
José Rodríguez, MD, FAAFP, et al
Redwood Health Center and University of Utah Health, Salt Lake City, Utah
https://www.doi.org/10.1370/afm.2785
The Annals of Family Medicine