Under his leadership, Ethiopia trained and deployed approximately 40,000 community health care workers to almost every village in the country focusing on basic primary care: diagnosing and treating malaria, providing basic prenatal care and moving women to facility-based deliveries, and improving childhood nutrition.
All five MSF projects included basic primary care outpatient and emergency triage clinics; referral systems for local hospitals; and nutrition, maternal health, mental health and sexual and gender-based violence programmes.
Citizens have access to a free state health care plan, which provides basic primary care coverage, and private clinics provide most specialty care.
First trimester abortion services are provided at two of the primary care facilities (nurse-run clinics that provide all basic primary care services) and second trimester abortion services are provided at a secondary-level referral hospital that serves both sub-districts.
In contrast, the Oxfam-funded insurance schemes have achieved considerable increases in access to basic primary care, in utilization and in affordability through improving financial protection in participating communities, while maintaining equitable access.
> -wrap-foot> The most prevalent form of health service provision in slum areas under study was the informal private sector, with formal provision limited to a few NGOs operating maternal, neonate and child care services, and satellite clinics providing basic primary care on specific days and hours of the week.
In the health sector this can imply meaningful incentives to provide primary care in slums and rural areas; focusing training efforts on prevention and basic primary care rather than higher-level tertiary care; giving providers the medicines and tools they need to practice effectively; and dismantling domestic barriers to independent practice by well-trained nurses.
In the 2008-09 Policy Address, the government proposes further to subsidise chronic disease patients in receiving comprehensive treatment, follow-up and care support from private doctors, and is also planning to introduce basic primary care service models focusing on preventive care and a primary care register based on the family-doctor concept.
Training for a health worker ranges from 4 to 18 months and includes intensive training in basic primary care, infectious disease, maternal child care, first aid and public health.
Clinics provide only basic primary care, health centres provide inpatient and general medicine consultation, while district hospitals provide also small surgery.
