title: Primary health care organizations - through a conceptual and a political lens.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Governments around the world are looking at means to improve health care services and health outcomes for their communities within a sustainable expenditure framework. There is a general agreement that strengthening primary health care is the way for the future. Primary health care organizations (PHCOs) are seen as a means to achieving more effective and efficient health care.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This paper proposes a complex adaptive framework for PHCOs, taking account of health and illness being subjective experiences, health care being 'whole person'-focused, and PHCOs focusing on all of a community's health determinants and community-based health care needs. Such approach would foster building healthy local communities as much as seamless integration of health services for all. However, despite the expressed intensions towards patient-centred health care reform the bureaucratic mindset of Australian health policy makers risks true reform by imposing highly structured - rather than 'simple'- policy and operational rules.
authors.affiliation: Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. jp.sturmberg@gmail.com
authors.forename: Joachim P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Sturmberg
mesh_terms: D003153:Community Health Services / Q000458:organization & administration; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D018802:Patient-Centered Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*