Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place

Economic, demographic, and social pressures, together with technological, medical and pharmacological advances have reconfigured places used for health care in various ways. The structure and function of many traditional settings, like hospitals and long-term care institutions, have been modified and many health care services currently are provided in places where people live, work, shop, and attend school. Moreover, the introduction of services such as health information provided over the Internet, telephone consultation, remote monitoring and intervention technologies, and even robotic surgery means that it has become increasingly unnecessary for care providers and recipients to be proximal in space. Under these new circumstances, the social, spatial, and political relations of health care have been altered irrevocably.As such, those engaged in geographic research on primary health care have been compelled to look beyond traditional issues pertaining to patterns of service delivery and use in order to fully conceptualize the implications of such changes for the ways in which health services are delivered, experienced, and used.This collection focuses on such changes in primary health care, not only because it is the most basic and integral form of health service delivery, but also because it is an area to which geographers have made significant contributions and to which other scholars have engaged in 'thinking geographically' about its core concepts and issues. Including perspectives from both consumers and producers, it moves beyond geographical accounts of the context of health service provision through its explicit focus on the practice of primary health care. This allows for the investigation of the geography of primary health care work and the everyday doing of primary health care, timely topics that are not often directly addressed in the existing geographic or health services literatures."Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place" draws together significant contributions from established experts across a variety of disciplines to discuss four main thematic areas related to the production of primary health care: practice and delivery; people (patients and service providers); places and settings; and pressing and emerging areas of inquiry.With arguments well-supported by empirical research, this book will appeal not only to scholars of health geography, but also to students and researchers across a range of social sciences, such as sociology, economics, health policy and anthropology, as well as to professionals involved in health services.