Primary Health Care, Health Systems & Equity

Overview

Primary health care is where many of WEMA's scientific questions converge. Cervical screening, hypertension control, malaria prevention, AKI recognition, adolescent vaccination and maternal-risk management all depend on ordinary health-system functions: a trained workforce, reliable supplies, clear roles, usable information, referral pathways, financing and relationships with communities.

This Theme therefore serves as a substantive research domain rather than a generic cross-cutting label. It asks how health systems absorb evidence-based interventions, why implementation breaks down, how programmes can adapt to local capacity, and what makes improvement equitable and sustainable. The unit of analysis may be a patient journey, a clinic workflow, a workforce policy, a financing mechanism, a referral network or an entire scale-up strategy.

It is a research problem in its own right - one that can be studied, optimized, costed, adapted and improved.