Decentering community-based health care -Regional perspectives on the Alma-Ata conference on Primary Health Care

Convened in 1978 by WHO and UNICEF under the slogan 'Health for All', the Alma-Ata Conference endorsed 'Primary Health Care' as a new global health strategy, which privileged community-based health and brought together figures as diverse as the Maoist 'barefoot doctor' and the Christian medical missionary. Applying a deliberate regional approach, the workshop will analyze the vision of 'Primary Health Care' as a brief moment of global consensus, which integrated and condensed a wide range of existing developments, and which transformed into very different forms of health care in the decades after 1978. In this way the workshop provide a historically grounded, non-Eurocentric and genuinely global understanding of the diversity of community based health care across the contemporary world.