Advocacy for Primary Care

IPCRG advocates for strong primary care to achieve respiratory health.  Our vision is a global population breathing and feeling well through universal access to right care.   This means that we support  the goal of the United Nations' Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve Universal Health Coverage, leaving no-one behind and no-one in poverty due to health bills.   Without a widely spread, multi-disciplinary respected and trusted primary care workforce we will not achieve universal health coverage.  Without investment in their competence to find, diagnose, treat and support people with respiratory problems we will not achieve universal health coverage. Without investment in health information systems in primary care and its right to prescribe and dispense essential medicines such as tobacco dependence pharmacotherapy and inhaled medicines, we will also not achieve universal health coverage. Therefore we call on governments and payors to build trust in primary care and to invest in:

• Primary care to prevent, diagnose and treat respiratory disease & tobacco dependence applying right care principles
• Practical peer-led training and education
• Integrated care systems, involving patients, primary and secondary, multi-disciplinary health and social care
• Generation of real life evidence to feed guidelines that are useful in primary care
• Primary care as population health educators and system leaders
• Right incentives to practise population respiratory heath: go where the people in need are
• Universal access to good quality inhaled medicines and devices and tobacco treatment and training in how to use them
• IPCRG that can leverage major clinician-led change working locally, collaborating globally

We regularly showcase the value of primary care in our publications and in programmes such as Asthma Right Care and COPD Right Care.