review · BMC Primary Care
Community health programmes deliver primary healthcare services directly to local populations. These initiatives address social determinants of health, promote wellbeing, lower healthcare costs, prevent disease progression, and decrease hospitalisation rates. Despite their crucial role within broader health systems, these programmes face significant obstacles that hinder their potential. Key barriers include insufficient funding, minimal involvement from the private sector, inadequate quality of care, and an underemphasis on non-communicable diseases. Expanding access and achieving universal, equitable healthcare depends on securing greater financial and human resources. Directing resources into community programmes strengthens primary care delivery, ensuring that unreached populations receive quality services. Furthermore, additional implementation research is required to tackle the growing challenge of non-communicable diseases through these community platforms.
Community health programmes provide primary healthcare directly to underserved populations, reducing costs and preventing avoidable hospital visits. Addressing chronic funding shortages, improving service quality, and integrating care for non-communicable diseases are necessary steps for health systems striving to achieve universal and equitable health coverage for all communities.
The abstract identifies limited private sector engagement and inadequate funding as key challenges for community health programmes. Private healthcare providers, investors, and health administrators could explore partnership models to supply resources, improve service quality, and support the management of non-communicable diseases. As this review focuses on high-level system challenges and calls for implementation research, any practical interventions remain at an early exploratory or operational planning stage.
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CHPs are platforms for implementing and delivering PHC services close to communities. They help to modify social determinants of health, promote health and wellbeing, reduce care costs, prevent disease progression, and reduce hospitalisation rates. CHPs are integral parts of community health systems and require investment to improve access to PHC services. Gaps and challenges of CHPs include inadequate funding, limited engagement of the private sector, poor quality of health services, and limited focus on non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Further implementation research is needed to mitigate the burden of NCDs. Health systems efforts focus on increasing resources (e.g., financial and human) required in CHPs to ensure the quality of PHC services provided through CHPs toward better service access, and reaching the unreached and achieve equity and universality of PHC services.
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DOI: 10.1186/s12875-024-02629-5
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