These are structures that are physically located in communities, with are health care practitioner teams, initially comprising professional nurses and community health workers. As teams, their responsibility is to interact in a proactive way with every household – as a collective as well as with individual members – in their jurisdiction.
Their role is to promote health, prevent disease and detect disease early, and support treatment, rehabilitation and palliation; and to do this in a way that both develops capacity and shared responsibility for health care between service providers and service users.