Analysis of Barriers to Primary Care Access

Primary care is regarded as the first contact level between consumers of health and the
health care system. Some of the primary care services include provision of drugs, treatment
of common injuries and ailments, reproductive health, and immunization against
communicable diseases (Dassah et al., 2018). Failure to access primary health care on time
can lead to, among others, delay in treatment, foregoing care altogether. Thus, lack of access
to primary health care is generally associated with poor health outcomes. Despite this reality,
there are still large numbers of people who lack timely access to primary health care because
of various barriers that are discussed in this paper.

The main barriers to accessing primary care are shortage of physicians and cost. The
shortage of physicians is especially felt in rural areas. Nationally, just 10% of physicians
serve the 20% of the nation’s population that lives in rural areas (Dassah et al., 2018). This
low number of physicians serving in rural areas serves as a major barrier to primary care
access in those areas. Apart from shortages of physicians, cost is also a major barrier to
primary care access (Buerhaus, 2018). Without health insurance, many people cannot afford
the cost of primary care services.

Governments and healthcare organizations have implemented various measures to
address some of the barriers to primary care access. The most common measure is the use of
technology such as electronic health records. Such technologies free physicians from time-
consuming administrative tasks and allow them adequate time to provide services to
consumers (Jamoom et al., 2016).

While this measure helps in increasing the number of people that a physician can
serve, there other potentially effective measures that can be taken as well. One of them is

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allowing nurse practitioners to provide primary health care services. One of them is removing
restrictions on nurse practitioners that severe limit their scope of practice and allow them to
provide primary care services (Buerhaus, 2018). Since nurse practitioners are significantly
more than physicians and cheaper as well, allowing nurse practitioners to provide primary
care services will help in solving the problem of cost and shortage of physicians (Buerhaus,
2018). There are worries that allowing nurse practitioners to provide primary care services
may compromise safety of patients and quality of services that they receive. These worries
are unfounded as various studies have shown that care provided by nurse practitioners was
the same or even of higher quality than that provided by physicians (Buerhaus, 2018). Thus,
removing practice limits for nurse practitioners is one of the most effective ways of
increasing access to primary health services.

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References

Buerhaus, P. (2018). Nurse practitioners: A solution to America’s primary care crisis.
American Enterprise Institute, 1-30.

Dassah, E., Aldersey, H., McColl, M. A., & Davison, C. (2018). Factors affecting access to
primary health care services for persons with disabilities in rural areas: a “best-fit”
framework synthesis. Global health research and policy, 3(1), 36.

Jamoom, E. W., Heisey-Grove, D., Yang, N., & Scanlon, P. (2016). Physician opinions about
EHR use by EHR experience and by whether the practice had optimized its EHR use.
Journal of health & medical informatics, 7(4).