Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place

Health care is constantly undergoing change and refinement resulting from the adoption of new practices and technologies, the changing nature of societies and populations, and also shifts in the very places from which care is delivered. Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place draws together significant contributions from established experts across a variety of disciplines to focus on such changes in primary health care, not only because it is the most basic and integral form of health service delivery, but also because it is an area to which geographers have made significant contributions and to which other scholars have engaged in 'thinking geographically' about its core concepts and issues. Including perspectives from both consumers and producers, it moves beyond geographical accounts of the context of health service provision through its explicit focus on the practice of primary health care. With arguments well-supported by empirical research, this book will appeal not only to scholars across a range of social and health sciences, but also to professionals involved in health services.

Valorie A. Crooks is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Gavin J. Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health, Aging and Society, McMaster University, Canada.

1: Thinking Geographically About Primary Health Care; 2: Geographical Perspectives on Health Care; 1: Practice and Delivery; 3: Access and Utilization Reconsidered; 4: The Effects of Population Density, Physical Distance and Socio-Economic Vulnerability on Access to Primary Health Care in Rural and Remote British Columbia, Canada; 5: The Role of Scale in Conceptualizing Primary Health Care Practice; 6: Cloaked Selective Primary Health Care? Local Observations of Rural Primary Health Care Clinics in Perú; 2: People; 7: Geographies of Family Medicine; 8: The Place of Nursing in Primary Health Care; 9: Reinventing Primary Care; 10: New Health Geographies of Complementary, Alternative and Traditional Medicines in Primary Health Care; 3: Places and Settings; 11: Considering the Clinic Environment; 12: Within and Beyond Clinics; 13: Providers of Care in the Home; 14: On the Street; 4: Agenda Setting; 15: The Geographies of Primary Health Care