ABSTRACT
The performance of the tasks with a high degree of quality implies that a health center and its practitioners must take a very assertive role toward the patient population it serves. It means that the center first of all must emphasize health education—the attempt not only to change patient attitudes, but also to promote personal behavior which emphasizes the maintenance of health. The health center must take the responsibility to initiate action in the monitoring areas of presymptomatic or asymptomatic disease. A health maintenance check list is essential to remembering when the last health maintenance test or immunization was performed and when the next is required. As a community resource, the health center must expand the concept of primary prevention beyond that of immunization against infectious disease to that of amelioration or elimination of environmental problems that cause disease. The health center must be constantly sensitive to environmental causes of disease through data collected from individual patients.
