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Community Oriented Primary Care
The Community Oriented Primary Care program at the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services offers Master of Public Health (MPH) and Graduate Certificate programs designed to train health professionals and public health practitioners to deliver effective community-based interventions through the principles and methods of COPC.
COPC provides the bridge between clinical medicine and public health, in which the community is the focal point in the delivery of health care. It provides a conceptual and methodological framework to rationalize, organize, and adapt available resources to the delivery of health services. The methods are essential to the organized delivery of health care in community based practices, organizations engaged in managed care, and responsive governmental health systems.
The basic concepts of COPC were initially implemented in South Africa during the early 1940's by Sidney and Emily Kark with the creation of community health centers. These centers promoted a reorientation of health services at the community level through a unique linkage between individual clinical care and public health. They served as a laboratory for teaching and training health professionals.
Since that time, COPC has been taught and practiced in a number of settings around the world. Significantly it has been an important element in the Community Health Center movement, the Indian Health Service, and a number of urban health departments in the United States as well as a variety of public health and primary care systems around the world. Developments in computer-based information management, geographic information systems, and qualitative information gathering techniques have proved important recent assets to COPC practice.