Primary Health Care Implementation Solutions Initiative

WHO launched the Primary Health Care (PHC) Implementation Solutions Initiative to explore how countries have achieved success in scaling up PHC-oriented health systems. To do so, the initiative set out to document and share lessons from diverse contexts from the vantage point of policy-makers and practitioners directly engaged in leading reforms. 

Political Economy Analysis of Primary Health Care–oriented Reforms Country Case Study Series

As part of the initiative, the first series of country case studies looks at PHC-oriented reforms from a political economy viewpoint. Health system reforms are inherently political. They involve redistributing resources among various stakeholders to achieve just and equitable access for affordable and high-quality health care. Reforms often entail changes to institutional aspects of the health system, such as funding, provider payments, governance, service delivery arrangements and human resources. They also require complex modes of engagement between public and private groups and between health and non-health stakeholders, each with their own interests. 

These political-economic factors shape how much priority PHC-oriented reforms are given, how they are designed, adopted and implemented and, eventually, whether they are sustained or reversed. Although politics has been recognized as central to reorienting health systems towards the PHC approach, the politics of this process is often overlooked in policy and PHC discourse. The political economy dynamics of reforms have therefore been less explicitly explored in the existing literature documenting country case studies.  

The Political Economy Analysis of Primary Health Care–oriented Reforms Country Case Study Series set out to address this gap, aiming ultimately to unpack the implementation pathways undertaken in country-specific reforms to understand how and why reforms followed the trajectories they did, specifically focusing on how political challenges were overcome. Find the country cases below to learn more.