Fact: 400 million lack access to basic primary care
…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
400 million people around the world lack access to basic primary care services, according to the World Health Organization, 2015.
The WHO identified a list of essential health services, ”including family planning, antenatal care, skilled birth attendance, child immunization, antiretroviral therapy, tuberculosis treatment, and access to clean water and sanitation — in 2013, and found that at least 400 million people lacked access to at least one of these services.”
Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. As the Economist points out, defining the gap in a traditional public global health context (as the WHO is wont to do) has two shortcomings. One, it ignores the invisible burden of non-communicable diseases like diabetes or hypertension: only roughly half of those afflicted know they have it. This means that beyond the semantics of how we define ‘primary care’ or ‘coverage,’ the actual number of people who need care but aren’t getting it stretches much higher than the WHO’s calculation.
Second, the WHO definition ignores the quality of care, which is highly variable in both developing countries like India and China, not to mention right here in the US. Measuring and assessing quality is problematic even in the most advanced health IT in the world — which means our conservative estimates for how many people need better health care are too conservative.
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