Building Community Capacity in Leadership for Primary Health Care in Colombia

Primary health care looks beyond clinical services to health promotion and primary prevention at the population level. In 2011, Colombia adopted a normative approach to primary health care, to advance efforts to set health priorities and transcend a curative, hospital-based system. An intervention was carried out in eight communities in Bogota and Cundinamarca, Colombia to build community capacity to influence health. Activities included training community leaders to design and implement health improvement initiatives aimed at the most important health problems identified by their organizations. Twenty-eight leaders completed the training. They designed and implemented eight health improvement plans to address the most important health problems in their respective communities: protecting public spaces for children's physical activities, improving family practices in child nutrition, organizing a health insurance beneficiaries' health promotion network, organizing a service delivery network for homeless persons, connecting people with cognitive disabilities to treatment services, combatting violence against women, working against child abuse, and integrating health education into school curricula. Lessons were learned about capacity-building in primary care, approaches to strengthening intra- and interinstitutional conditions, and managing processes for community ownership. The intervention enabled development of initiatives for solving various problems by different types of organizations, highlighted participants' understanding of their role as health agents, and promoted community participation and intersectoral action.