More than 40% of the population of CPLP countries does not have access to primary health care, one of the topics to be debated at the International Seminar on Primary Health Care in Community Member States, which begins today in Lisbon.
Filomeno Fortes, director of the Portuguese Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (IHMT), one of the organizers of the seminar, told Lusa that health coverage in the countries of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) is less than 60%.
“There are no health centers, there are no nurses and, therefore, this is another major obstacle to improving health indicators”, he noted.
At the meeting that begins today at the CPLP headquarters, and runs until Friday, the great diversity from a health point of view that exists in the countries of this community will be one of the topics under analysis, as well as responses to the lack of primary health care in some of these states.
The seminar will feature representatives from the nine Member States, who will present their respective health characteristics, which differ greatly from country to country.
“From a health point of view, we have CPLP countries that are on different continents and that also have different levels of socioeconomic development and, therefore, there is a great diversity in relation to the panorama of diseases”, the director of IHMT told Lusa .
The expert gave three examples that demonstrate this diversity: “While Angola and Mozambique have a predominance of communicable diseases, Portugal has a panorama of chronic diseases and Cape Verde, an African country, has a panorama that we call epidemiological transition, whatever say that we are starting to have more chronic diseases than communicable diseases”.
“This implies health systems with different characteristics, health policies also with other variants”, he said.
The expert highlighted, however, that “whatever the Governments’ philosophy, primary health care remains the basis of any national health system”.
Filomeno Fortes defended greater political commitment to responses at the primary health level, stating that “there are countries in Africa, within the CPLP, that allocate less than 10% of their general state budget to health”, namely Angola and Mozambique.
“There must be a reinforcement of political will, because without funding there is no primary health care,” he said, listing human resources as another constraint in this area.
“There must be more investment in the training of human resources in the area of maternal health, child health, because whether it is vaccination, care for pregnant women, child care, issues of malnutrition, if we do not have staff who are minimally prepared to respond to these priorities, primary health care will not respond”, he indicated.
The seminar is organized by the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of the NOVA University of Lisbon (IHMT NOVA) and the National Council of Health Secretaries (CONASS), in partnership with the CPLP executive secretariat.
Source: rr.sapo.pt
