Promoting health and preventing illness

Introduction A primary care approach puts its main emphasis on promoting health and preventing illness, which is self-evidently preferable to curing disease. For the individual, staying healthy is better than falling ill and for society as a whole, spending money on preventing disease is a more constructive use of resources than spending it on curing sick people. However, the soundness of the argument has not been matched by progress in either shifting health care resources towards preventive strategies or effectively reducing preventable disease.