About the compendium

Primary health care (PHC)-oriented policies, strategies and operational plans should be informed by the best available evidence of what works and how. The intelligence captured in country case studies is key to providing this information. While there is increasing attention to document the stories of PHC-oriented health system transformations, these cases are often dispersed across different websites and in varied formats that can limit their searchability. The PHC Country Case Study Compendium has been designed to address this gap. 

 Aims 

The PHC Country Case Study Compendium sets out to: 

1. Serve as a central hub for global PHC country case studies from WHO and partners 
2. Enhance the searchability and access to PHC country case studies 
3. Encourage further work to document PHC country cases  

 This aim is in line with the 2019 resolution on PHC WHA 72.2 and the prioritization of PHC-oriented research captured in the Operational Framework for Primary Health Care.  

About the compendium 

The compendium was launched in May 2024 with nearly 200 country case studies published following or leading up to the 2018 Astana Declaration. The catalogue of cases is global in nature and captures publications across WHO global, regional and country offices, international development partners, networks, and platforms such as the UHC Partnership, among other stakeholders. The compendium prioritizes the indexing of cases beyond those that are already indexed and searchable in library databases, making it a resource of primarily gray literature. Each case illustrates one or more of the strategic or operational levers of the PHC Operational Framework. Indexing by PHC component and lever, among other filters, allows for cases to be searched accordingly. 

Searching country cases 

Country cases are searchable by a range of filters.

• contextual filters by country, WHO region, and income level 
• the three defining PHC components 
• PHC levers 
• health programmes, such as noncommunicable diseases or sexual and reproductive health, or sub-categories, like cancers or pregnancy and birth 
• case study type

Submitting a country case  

The PHC Country Case Study Compendium is a living resource and is continuously expanding to include new publications. Country cases can be submitted to the secretariat to add to the compendium. Please contact compendium4phc@who.int.  

 The PHC Country Case Study Compendium is maintained by the WHO Special Programme on PHC together with a global network of WHO Collaborating Centres including the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto.