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Ruth Wanjala, KEMRI Wellcome Trust, Kenya
Community-based primary health care (CBPHC) has long underpinned health service delivery in resource-limited settings. Yet demographic change, rising chronic disease, and rapid digital transformation now test its sustainability.
Drawing on global evidence from 1975 to 2025, Dr Bipin Adhikari from Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), and colleagues, examine how community health workers expanded access and advanced equity, and argue that CBPHC must evolve into an integrated, people-centred, digitally enabled model if it is to deliver universal health coverage.