Practicing Hope: Enhancing Empowerment in Primary Health Care through Community-based Participatory Research

The World Health Organization's (WHO's) Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978 made Primary Health Care (PHC) the official health policy of all WHO member countries, stressing the importance of multisectoral collaboration and community empowerment as critical for delivering quality primary healthcare and public health services to achieve social justice and health equity. Over forty years later, a divide remains between seeing individual patients in the traditional biomedical model and addressing population-level social determinants of health. One promising approach for the intentional and active integration of multi-sectoral partnering practices and community empowerment into Primary Health Care is the use of community-based participatory research (CBPR). The power of CBPR lies in its systematic approach to facilitating equitable collaboration of partners based on community priorities and strengths and is increasingly recognized for improving health equity outcomes. This paper highlights the use of CBPR as a promising practice for healthcare organizations to bridge the gap between the traditional individual patient focus and the comprehensive primary healthcare approach from WHO. We use a narrative case study from A Ministry of Sharing (AMOS) Health and Hope, a PHC organization in Nicaragua, to illustrate the use of the CBPR model as an implementation framework that facilitated the transformation of structures, policies, and practices as AMOS created multi-sector partnerships and embraced community empowerment as part of its strategic and comprehensive approach to health equity.