The Right to Healthcare, Universal Health Coverage and Primary Health Care: The Necessary Relationship

dlegge — Thu, 23 May 2024 02:30:52 +0000

07 February 2024

dlegge Thu, 23/05/2024 - 12:30

Author/s

T. Sundararaman and Mekhala Krishnamurthy

Conversations on health policy

The Right to Healthcare, Universal Health Coverage and Primary Health Care: The…

Three concepts – The Right to Healthcare, Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and Primary Health Care (PHC) – are all globally accepted as essential principles in the construction of health systems. It is important, however, to delineate how these concepts relate to each other and the variance with which the terms themselves are defined as well as the relationship among and between them as they come to be established in different strands of health policy discourse. This is important because the three terms are often either taken up as independent strategies (with various pathways) or placed in subordinate, linear, conflicting or contradictory relationships rather than first understanding each one clearly and then building up a relational perspective.

One approach to this task would be to take a semantic approach and to draw on published literature to map out all the variations and the alternatives they pose. Instead, the approach taken in this article is to engage with the debate as we have encountered it in the making of health policy in the Indian context and to bring in examples from other contexts, especially other Low-or Middle-Income Countries (LMIC) wherever appropriate to help inform the elements under contention today. In the process, the article attempts to establish the case for the necessary and essential relationship between these three terms in shaping and supporting the health systems we need to achieve the outcomes we seek.

Keywords

PHC (Primary Health Care)

UHC (Universal health coverage)

RTH