Rethinking Primary Care

Abstract

Primary care is a vast area of study and practice that aims to cover a broad range of human health. It has grown exponentially over the decades, dramatically increasing life spans across demographics, communities, and countries around the world. However, ironically, this vast area of study that provides so many benefits to society today is often restrictive. It is true that primary care encompasses many tasks that help take care of people all around the globe, which includes identifying and managing a vast number of conditions and diseases on their early onset, practicing preventive care techniques, and coordinating with specialists in specific fields. But notice how these tasks are restricted to identifying and moving on to specialist referrals without really taking the time to understand why the population is even experiencing such conditions and aiming to find a solution to it. Primary care being the first major center of healthcare that almost all people around the world experience, primary care physicians have gone through many scenarios where they were lacking the proper knowledge or medication to treat novel conditions they had never seen before, to which they have taken an educated prediction in trying to find the appropriate specialists, all for helping their community out. However, in many cases the referral is a waste of time and money for both the patient and healthcare officials. This problem has been on a slow but steady increase over the past years across developed countries especially, and it is unfair to blame any one party. As a result, it is very crucial to start rethinking our present-day objectives of primary care to better equip our front players of care with the capability to not only identify conditions and diseases but also to be innovators and independent researchers. This paper proposes potential changes to the modern primary care system to help progress society in the ever-growing face of novel, dangerous, fast-growing issues facing human health.