Family Doctor Program: A 20-Year Success Story

By Iris Armas and Francis Norniella

Havana, Nov 30 (AIN) Twenty years after its modest beginning, the Cuban Family Doctor program has received the praise of international health organizations, while the successful experiment has extended beyond the island’s borders.

Panelists on the Tuesday evening edition of the nationally broadcast The Round Table program credited the original idea to President Fidel Castro and noted how it has created a new vision of community medicine and primary healthcare in Cuba.

In a special edition of the broadcast, one of the founders of the program, Dr. Jose Rodriguez, told the audience that more than 99 percent of the Cuban population benefits from this project that – according to Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, former Director General of the World Health Organization – is a model to be emulated by other nations.

The Family Doctor Program is one of the backbones of the public health care system in Cuba. Its role in improving sanitary conditions and healthcare are accomplished through integrated actions focusing on illness prevention at the community level, according to Professor Rodriguez.

The family doctor has turned into the health guardian for every person in our country, providing personal care to each patient.

This is done through regular home visits to the sick, infants and the elderly, and by medical personnel accompanying people to clinics and hospitals whenever a higher level of medical attention is required.

One of the health care programs that received a tremendous stimulus with the implementation of the Family Doctor Program has been the national vaccination campaign. Just two years after the program started, 98 percent of the Cuban population was immunized – a level greater than ever before achieved. This was said to have dramatically reduced communicable diseases in the country.

Six communicable diseases have now disappeared in Cuba due to the comprehensive coverage provided by family doctors.

Currently, communicable disease control is approaching levels of coverage at theoretical limits, according to epidemiologists.

The Family Doctor Program serves the entire nation and has demonstrated its effectiveness in ensuring healthcare for everyone, according to Dr. Jose Ramon Balaguer, the Cuban Minister of Public Health, who gave a special presentation on The Round Table broadcast

Dr. Balaguer pointed out that Cuba is the only nation in the world that has such a humanitarian health care system, one which is coherent and highly organized.

In many parts of the world, healthcare has a private orcooperative character – very distinct from the Cuban model, which places special emphasis on preventive medicine and community healthcare education, according to Dr. Balaguer.

If Cuban healthcare statistics are among the world's best, this is due in large part to the outstanding efforts of physicians and nurses that staff the Family Doctor Program.

Such Cuban healthcare workers also provide services in remote places around the world, Balaguer noted.

The Cuban Public Health Care Minister made reference to the importance of the program at the grassroots level indicating how this has led to reductions in infant mortality rates to extremely low levels and much lower death rates of women in childbirth.

Dr. Tania Perez Xiques, the national director of the Family Doctor Program, emphasized the importance of family nurses, who constitute roughly half of the nation's 82,000 nurses . Dr. Perez Xiques also highlighted transformations initiated in 2002 that have increased primary-care levels in the community as part of socialist Cuba’s ongoing health programs.

Services now provided in easily-accessible community clinicsn include ultrasonic scanning, electrocardiography, endoscopy, physical rehabilitation, specialized care for allergic patients, and others services formerly available only at larger more distant hospitals.

During the Round Table broadcast devoted to the 20th Anniversary of Cuba's revolutionary Family Doctor Program, participants also mentioned unique possibilities for further education and training of healthcare specialists that includes possibilities of obtaining Masters and Ph.D. degrees