Selective primary health care: the counter revolution

Primary health care in the WHO sense was triggered indirectly by the failure of the Malaria Eradication Programme. The response to this failure was an ideological change which considered that health services were not purely a way of delivering health care interventions to people but were something important to individuals and groups in their own right. Key changes of this idea called primary health care were linked to qualities such as power, ownership, equity and dignity. Such an ideological change involves the evolution of new forms to reflect the changes in content and some of these structures still require development. The advocates of highly selected and specific health interventions plus themanagerial processes to implement them have ignored, or put on one side, the ideas which are at the core of what could be described as the primary health care revolution. They are in this sense counter revolutionaries.