Health care delivery

The delivery of modern health care depends on groups of trained professionals and paraprofessionals coming together as interdisciplinary teams.This includes professionals in medicine, nursing, dentistry, midwifery-obstetrics and allied health, plus many others such as public health practitioners, community health workers and assistive personnel, who systematically provide personal and population-based preventive, curative and rehabilitative care services.

While the definitions of the various types of health care vary depending on the different cultural, political, organizational and disciplinary perspectives, there appears to be some consensus that primary care constitutes the first element of a continuing health care process, that may also include the provision of secondary and tertiary levels of care. Healthcare can be defined as either public or private.