Section 2 Public Health

**97**

**Chapter 6**

**Abstract**

response, recovery

**1. Introduction**

teams' response [1].

Role of Primary Health Care

*Abdulnasir Falah Huaidi Al-Jazairi*

System in Response to a Major

Incident: Challenges and Actions

There is obvious increase in world population and in term of number of major incidents (MI) all over the world, there is a need for faster and wider responses. To achieve this aim and keep losses to the minimum, we need to optimize our methods and protocols of the response to decrease the losses, pain, and suffering of people and losses of infrastructures, belongings, and the country's future. Primary health care (PHC) system, which is present in all residency gatherings in cities and towns, provides suitable potential for this improvement. This role has been formulated in 1978 in Alma-Ata meeting, which changes the scope of service of primary health care system to take responsibility of the community in addition to patients' care. The involvement of the primary health care in response to major incidents shows good results, and there is a need to strengthen the major incidents' response plan in the primary health care to provide better response and help to all populations especially the vulnerable ones.

**Keywords:** primary health care, major incidents, vulnerable population, planning,

There is a noticeable increase in major incidents (MI) of different types affecting the world in the last three decades with increased human and financial losses. There are different types of incidents: natural, man-made, and infectious epidemics. For optimum response to those incidents, there should be multidisciplinary coordinated

Shortly after I started writing this chapter, the COVID-19 epidemic in China expanded to be a pandemic, affecting too many countries and hundreds of thousands of people and killing more than 50,000 all over the world. This has a clear

Primary health care (PHC) system scope of service was concentrated on disease

consultations and prescription of medication. This scope had been changed in 1978 by the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which considered health care as fundamental human right. Section V in the declaration stated clearly that the primary health care system is the key to achieve the targets of the declaration. This declaration leads to the change of the scope of work of the PHC from giving advice about patients' symptoms to the comprehensive health care of the community [2]. This aim of comprehensive health care of the PHC was reviewed in WHO report in 2008 [3], which centered on taking the PHC service from hospitals and specialized centers to

effect on my chapter to concentrate on this type of major incidents.

## **Chapter 6**
