Primary health care system in rural India: A critical review

Back ground: India is a land of diversity. While linguistic, cultural and religious boundaries differentiate Indians, the unique voice that unites them is for setting up a better health care system. A report by the World Bank indicated that owing to scarcity of resources, the existing health care system in India has been unable to provide care to all. Structurally, India has a large, three-tier public health care system, and the primary care system is one of the major components of the public health care systems. Primary health care is provided through a network of sub-centres, primary health centres (PHCs) and community health centres.

Objective: This is a critical review regarding the functioning of Indian primary health care system.

Materials and Methods: This review process has covered the studies and reports conducted on this regard from 1946 to 2010.

Result and Conclusions: The primary health care system in India has been dysfunctional and not geared suitably to serve the health needs of the people due to many reasons, as has been established below with the help of available literature. There have been many studies carried out to study the popularity and the satisfaction of the beneficiaries of the services of PHCs in India, in the context of scarcity of the resources and poor quality of the services provided.