Policy Interview

Angela Seip

07/13/2013

HLT-205

Daisy Savarirajan

Policy Interview

I choose to focus on the role of the primary physician in the healthcare system. The health care provider has an extremely important role in how well the system works or doesn’t work in a society, as well as in the growth of a population.

Primary care physicians are the first level of health care. Primary care physicians are trained in many different disease prevention methods. Primary care medicine has three divisions of physicians, they include primary care, internal medicine, and pediatricians. Primary care focuses on general family health care, internists diagnose, and treat diseases and may specialize in a certain area of the body and pediatricians focus on treating children.

Primary health care became a main program for the World Health Organization in 1978. The key strategy for this included the possibility of reducing death rates in poor populations by increasing access to health care, by focusing on preventative medicine, developing acceptable health systems, and adding a primary health care policy.

The fact is that most of the work in treating a patient falls in the hands of a primary care physician. The primary physician is the one that monitors and maintains all medications taken by the patient, maintains records of all tests including blood tests and xrays, and hospital follow ups just to name a few. It is also the responsibility for the primary to submit and get authorization for any referrals that are needed for the patient. Primary physicians are being pushed out when it comes to the decisions regarding the care of their patients, they are feeling pressured to change the course of a patient’s treatment plan to apply to the standards of insurance companies, and by doing this the insurance companies will offer incentives to the physicians to use a less conventional method, even though it may not be in the best interest of the patients. They are also pressuring physicians to...