Forty years after the Alma-Ata Declaration was made in 1978 – identifying primary health care as the key to the attainment of the goal of Health for All – The Lancet published a series of articles exploring progress in primary care, including a photo essay by Dr Alexander Kumar featuring primary care doctors around the world.

Dr Kumar’s essay ‘Picturing health: global primary health care’ shows the context for each primary care practice and reveals the drive and ambition that each featured doctor brings to their goal of contributing to better health for all.

Dr Tanya Blumenfeld, GP and University of Cambridge primary care tutor, was featured in the essay and on the front cover of The Lancet. She explained how her work to improve the health of a large community of Cambridgeshire Travellers is uncovering health inequalities ranging from low vaccination rates for children to reduced life expectancy compared with other populations.

“In 2011, for the first time, ‘Irish Traveller’ was introduced as a UK census category. However, Travellers are still not recognised as an ethnic group in the UK’s National Health Service”

– Dr Tanya Blumenfeld, GP and primary care tutor at University of Cambridge

Dr Blumenfeld, whose goal is to improve the health care of this largely ignored population group, teaches University of Cambridge medical students at her Cambridgeshire practice and supports their research projects (Student Selected Component or SSC), which often focus on aspects of the healthcare her practice offers to the local Traveller community.

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Image: Tanya Blumenfeld, general practitioner and clinical tutor, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, photograph Alexander Kumar

Published with thanks to Alexander Kumar: School of Population Health and Environmental Sciences, King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, www.alexanderkumar.com

Learn more: contact Lucy Lloyd, Communications Manager, Primary Care Unit