[Primary health care: reality or utopia in a developing country?]

Though it is 20 years since the acceptance, by member nations of WHO, of the concept of primary health care (PHC) as the best and cheapest means of achieving "Health for All in the Year 2000", most developing nations have made little or no progress toward its attainment. This is due, among other things, to a misconception of the meaning of PHC, by both developing and developed nations. While many developing nations see it as a new vertical programme, and therefore fail to integrate it into already existing ones, most developed nations take it, wrongly to mean that the developing nations should return to ancient, primitive medicine, which in earlier times led to high morbidity even in the developed nations. In the developing countries, there is still a disproportionately high concentration of resources in urban areas, and much more emphasis is still being placed on curative than on preventive measures. To achieve "Health for all in the Year 2000", therefore, a reorientation of both the developed and the developing nations is urgently needed.