Health promotion in primary care: The British perspective

The structure of the British primary health care system allows for the development of a facilitator movement that can organize and encourage health care providers in local communities to coordinate health promotion efforts. We describe the Wycombe Primary Care Prevention Project to show how the facilitator movement can work in a local health district. The project's development and results to date demonstrate that the majority of primary care practices in the health district, departing from exclusive focus on individual care, now include community needs assessment and work on community-based health problems. We identify causative factors and discuss the generalizability of the project to other primary health care settings.