About IPCEA

IPCEA Purpose

The purpose and goal of this alliance is to advance the recognition and development of primary care medicine as the foundation required to provide timely and appropriate access to quality, cost-effective, humanitarian health care for all people of the world.

Individuals the world over cannot achieve their full potential for health and wellness without access to quality primary and preventative medical services and the presence of an ongoing continuity-care partnership between patient and provider.  The disparity in medical care is in part due to the focus on sub-specialty, procedure-oriented, institution-based care in much of the world. This creates a scenario that is driven by fragmented, heroic, interventional care.  By its very nature, this type of medical system is inefficient, ineffective, and costly when trying to provide health care for all people.  This system is discriminatory and creates health disparities among the world’s citizens, providing care only for the few who can afford it, while leaving millions of people without access to the care needed to achieve their true potential of personal health and quality of life.  Primary care physicians, family physicians, internists, pediatricians, and the nursing specialists that collaborate with them have a proud history of providing quality, cost-effective, continuous health care worldwide for all.

The osteopathic profession in the United States of America has a long, proud history of educating physicians dedicated to serving and advancing the health and wellness of disadvantaged and underserved populations across our country by producing a high percentage of graduates who enter primary care fields, including family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, women’s health, and geriatrics.  The osteopathic philosophy, based on the holistic principles which teach that health care must focus on treating the whole person, not merely the disease and that structural integrity is integral to proper function, has been successful for more than 140 years.  Acting on its belief that prevention of disease should be the primary focus of the physician and that the goal of treatment is to normalize the patient, the osteopathic philosophy is in harmony with the Chinese teaching of yin and yang and with the stated goals of many health care reform movements as a top priority in providing health care for all.

This primary care educational alliance, basing its actions and goals around this osteopathic philosophy and its principles will seek to bring together physicians, health care providers, health care foundations, governments, and industries to reach its goal of enriching global health through primary care education.