Health Care Needs of the Disadvantaged in a Rural-Urban Area

HEALTH CARE is a affair. The report of National Commission on Community Health Services states that services, operated to meet needs of every individual, should be located within environment of individual's home community (la). The report further points out that the performance of health services should not be considered province solely of physician and public health officer. It must be recognized that health 'team' is not a closed fraternity. . . . The vested interests of voluntary, private, and public agencies and of professions must be subjected to overriding interest-that of health of people (Jb). In summer of 1970 I was asked to chair a special Task Force on Priority Populations for ALPHA (Area-wide and Local Planning for Health Action, Inc.), a health group for a six-county region headquartered in Syracuse, N.Y. The task force operated under premise expressed by national commission that health care is not province of any special group. Our task was to identify health care needs of poor people, older people, and members of disadvantaged minority groups in this upstate New York area. The area consists of urban and rural sectors and, in many respects, is a prototype of middle-sized metropolitan communities throughout nation. Syracuse is its hub. It has a population of approximately 200,000 and is often used as a setting for commercial market research because of representativeness of its population.