Family and community medicine: complementary components of primary health care

An integrated practice of family and community medicine can address the problems of primary health care better than can either of these alone. This comprehensive practice will provide a family-oriented service based on epidemiologically defined needs and thus can perform ongoing evaluation of its programs. To become a reality, this requires changes in priorities and budget allocation in the health services as a whole, improvements in manpower training, and the provision of adequate tools for data collection and for epidemiological analysis.