It's also the 40th anniversary of the
Alma Ata Declaration - an opportunity to reaffirm that people-centered primary care must be the foundation of our efforts to achieve universal health coverage.
The Philippines also signed the
Alma Ata Declaration in 1978, which states that 'governments have a responsibility for the health of their people, which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures.
11) Retrospectively, the
Alma Ata Declaration can be seen as essentially a call for global solidarity: "All countries should cooperate in a spirit of partnership and service to ensure primary healthcare for all people, since the attainment of health by people in any one country directly concerns and benefits every other country.
Taking this into account, the year 1978 marked the assertion of the
Alma Ata Declaration at the Geneva International Conference on the Primary Health Care.
He added that Lebanon qualified to attend the golden jubilee of the
Alma Ata Declaration this year to address the issue with the international community, the only country in the Middle East to do so.
Culminating in the
Alma Ata declaration of 1978, this movement was explicitly political and saw world health as a rallying point for socio-economic change.
The
Alma Ata Declaration of Primary Health Care outlines community participation as one of the core elements to any health promotion initiatives [16, 27].
In 1979, as a student in a community nursing class, I remember how enthusiastic our teachers were the day they told us the
Alma Ata Declaration had been signed.
Development assistance for health has responded to advocacy, especially from the 1978
Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care (PHC) and the People's Charter of Health, Dhaka 2000 which reflected a groundswell of disillusionment over historic failures to adequately address the broader needs of the world's poor.
One was forwarded at the
Alma Ata Declaration of the World Health Organization which recommended a comprehensive approach to primary healthcare including "Education to inform prevailing health problems and measures to control them, food security and improved nutrition, supply of clean water and sanitary services, maternal and childcare services including family planning, immunization against communicable diseases, the control of locally endemic disease, and the supply of essential drugs for critical health problems.
It highlights new ideas and directions for public health practice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that have been strongly influenced by the
Alma Ata Declaration of Health for All through Primary Health Care (1978) and the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986).
The World Health Organisation's
Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 argued that public health was as much a social-political enterprise as a clinical one.
