Created in 1986, the Spanish National Health System adopted Primary Health Care (PHC) as one of its building blocks. Since the beginning, the Spanish PHC model has been the subject of both praise and criticism. Nowadays, a crisis in public policy funding - including health funding policies - is resurrecting old debates and raising new ones. This paper analyzes the data available about the degree of acceptance of PHC from the perspective of Spanish citizens as well as data about the debate produced in the last five years by politicians, patients and health workers. At the end of the paper the authors seek to draw some conclusions based on the commonly acknowledged strengths and weakness of the PHC model, which decision-makers ought to take into consideration in order to avoid mistakes caused by improvised decisions elicited by the requirements of the moment.
Health policies; Primary Health Care; Health indicators
