Primary care is the provision of integrated, accessible health care services by physicians and their health care teams who are accountable for addressing a large majority of personal health care needs, developing a sustained partnership with patients, and practicing in the context of family and community.

PHC is a whole-of-society approach to health that aims at ensuring the highest possible level of health and well-being and their equitable distribution by focusing on people’s needs and as early as possible along the continuum from health promotion and disease prevention to treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care, and as close as feasible to people’s everyday environment.

Primary care (PC) and public health (PH) have shared goals in addressing issues of disease prevention and health promotion in the community. PC providers have been principally focused on the health of individuals, but are increasingly oriented to responding to the health of the communities they serve. PH agencies are focused on the health of communities and are under increasing demand to find ways to collaborate and build relationships with PC.

The Family Medicine and Primary Care section is directed at scholarly work that has been generated in real life primary health care, such as prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of important health problems in the primary health care population, and functioning of our health care system.

Diabetes is the condition in which the body does not properly process food for use as energy. Most of the food we eat is turned into glucose, or sugar, for our bodies to use for energy. The pancreas, an organ that lies near the stomach, makes a hormone called insulin to help glucose get into the cells of our bodies