ABSTRACT
Over the past 30 years the international community has come to understand that hospitals, large and small, do not provide the sort of health care which most people need. As a result, governments and voluntary organizations have attempted to introduce new systems of 'primary care', emphasizing disease prevention rather than cure and community participation rather than over-dependence on medical personnel for health services..."Practising Health for All" presents a wide range of case studies depicting typical problems that arise in the implementation of primary health care - and how these can be overcome. We are not offering a 'ccok book' on how to run a primary health care programme. This would be an impossible task, given the widely varying situations of individual countries and regions throughout the world. But there are important lessons and principles to be drawn from the successful programmes analysed in this book, and perhaps even more important ones from the failures (ED).