Abstract
The African Journal of Primary Health & Family Medicine welcomes submissions that encourage scholarly exchange between family medicine and primary health care researchers and practitioners across Africa and the developing world, whilst providing a contextual and holistic view of family medicine as practiced across the continent.
Highlights
We pay lip-service to community involvement and to looking after a ‘population-at-risk’
We need to start with our existing practice population, those whom we already know and who do come
What if we redefined the role for the African context, to say that this person needs to be first and foremost a teacher, rather than a clinician? With a team of around 100 health personnel of different categories to provide comprehensive care to a population of 100 000 people, there is a great need for basic training and ongoing professional development
Summary
We pay lip-service to community involvement and to looking after a ‘population-at-risk’. Understanding our communities properly is the missing component of our practice and our teaching between the patients who present themselves for care and the communities that we seek to serve. Communityoriented primary care (COPC) is the connection between the concepts of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care. Maybe it could be seen as the glue that keeps them together. As clinicians we concentrate almost exclusively on personal care of the individual patient which is like the tip of an iceberg of ill-health or potential illness. COPC gives us the tools to combine preventive, promotive and curative approaches by focusing our efforts on a defined community and prioritising the issues.[2]
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