Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Healthc Manage Forum. 2024 Nov;37(6):451-456. doi: 10.1177/08404704241271141. Epub 2024 Aug 9.
Primary care is the key health system strategy for improving health, enhancing patient and clinician experience, saving money, and promoting equity. Once a pioneer in primary care, Canada now fails to provide access to millions of people. This crisis is widely recognized, but policy responses are varied and mostly incremental and piecemeal. The goal of providing primary care to everyone seems unrealistic and elusive in Canada, yet it has long been attained in many other countries. Without an explicit policy goal of primary care for all, most likely on a geographic basis, Canada will continue to underinvest and underperform in primary care, with ramifications that include rapidly escalating costs, emergency department and hospital overcrowding and a growing and inequitable burden of preventable suffering. A commitment to work towards this goal is needed now to ensure that Canadians have access to high-quality well-organized care for everyone.
初级保健是改善健康、提升患者和临床医生体验、节约成本和促进公平的关键卫生系统策略。加拿大曾是初级保健的先驱，但现在却未能为数百万人提供服务。这一危机已广为人知，但政策反应却各不相同，大多是增量的、零碎的。在加拿大，为每个人提供初级保健的目标似乎不切实际且难以实现，但在许多其他国家早已实现。如果没有一个明确的全民初级保健政策目标（很可能是基于地域的），那么加拿大在初级保健方面的投入和表现仍将不足，其后果包括成本迅速攀升、急诊和医院人满为患，以及可预防的痛苦负担不断增加和不公平。现在需要承诺努力实现这一目标，以确保加拿大人能够获得高质量、组织良好的全民医疗服务。
