Revitalising Health for All: Learning from Comprehensive Primary Health Care (CPHC)

This meeting, held in Johannesburg, South Africa from Wednesday, 28th November - Saturday, 1st December 2007, attended by Fran Baum and Catherine Hurley was the first face to face gathering of researchers from around the world working on the "Revitalising Health for All" grant funded by the Teasdale-Corti fund, based in Canada. The purpose of this partnership is to gather, in rigorous and systematic fashion, existing knowledge of Comprehensive Primary Health Care's past accomplishments and to undertake new studies of its current achievements and possibilities. Fran Baum is a lead investigator on this five year grant and SACHRU staff have been undertaking the first stage-a literature review and synthesis on the evidence for effectiveness of CPHC in Australasia and part of Asia.

The four day meeting was held in Johannesburg, South Africa and brought together researchers from Canada, South Africa, South America, Europe, India and Australia to discuss the findings from a worldwide literature review on evaluations of comprehensive primary health care programs and services. The first day of the meeting was taken up with each region presenting the preliminary findings of their reviews with chances to exchange information about the review process and the types of findings from around the world. Having worked on Australasia/Asia, it was very interesting and informative to compare and contrast our findings with those from Europe, North and South America, Africa and the grey literature in Asia. There were a number of similarities identified in the process issues including the difficulty of finding rigorous studies of comprehensive primary health care and a wide variation in the number of studies that met the inclusion criteria across the regions. Our region was generally well advanced in our review but with some work still to do. The report of our findings to date was well received.

The following three days were devoted to exploring and making decisions about how the findings of the literature review could be used to advance and inform a research agenda for comprehensive primary health care in line with the research program's objectives. Topics discussed in light of the findings of the literature reviews included:

The potential contents, structure and presenters for a series of two week courses on implementing and evaluating comprehensive primary health care. These courses will be held throughout 2008 in Canada, Australia, South America, India and Africa.

The completion of the literature reviews and their use thereafter. The meeting agreed that some identified short-comings of the literature reviews needed to be addressed and allocated additional funding from the budget to allow this to occur. In the case of Australasia, a targeted search of the grey literature using known contacts to fill some of the gaps not covered in the scientific literature will be the focus of the next few months. Completion of the papers was agreed for the end of May 2008. In the longer term, the reviews will be published, both in a report with the Canadian team providing a summary of the worldwide findings, and individually reported through conferences and possibly, journal articles. This will continue to be a collaborative venture with the researchers in the various countries keeping in contact as the reviews are finalised and reported. The processes for recruiting and funding researchers in comprehensive primary health care through a peer-reviewed expression of interest are to be released in early 2008 and assessed by June, 2008.