Considering the World Health Organization (WHO) Astana Declaration, in order to provide universal healthcare coverage, Kazakhstan through ongoing healthcare reform committed to the promotion of a people-centered Primary Healthcare (PHC) system. Since the implemented top-down policies showed low buy-in from community members and put more constraints on PHC facilities and teams, the Kazakh National Medical University, the Medeo district mayor's office and the WHO European Centre for PHC supported the initiative of a local non-governmental organization “Community health committee” and Outpatient clinic of Almaty State hospital #5, for creation of an integrated plan to develop people-centered PHC through better coverage and engagement of patients with non-communicable disease and enhancing the health literacy of the population above 65 years.

We used a community-based participatory approach. The process consisted of: forming a steering committee with at least one member from each stakeholder group; two interactive workshops where the community worked jointly with PHC professionals in defining priority health needs and proposing actions to address selected priorities; and, after, joint development by all stakeholders of an action plan for empowerment of the community, and for assessment and review of the scope of practice of PHC teams.

The interactive workshops identified priority health needs such as low health literacy, low responsibility for health, low engagement of the elderly in prevention and self-management of non-communicable diseases. The main findings of semi-structured interviews were that there are no planning approaches (neither shared planning by a PHC team, or individually by PHC professionals) for addressing defined priority needs of the community, families and/or patients, and that the role of a PHC team in community empowerment is very limited.

Using results of the review on PHC teams’ scope of practice, we will develop, discuss and agree with the national and local stakeholders’ proposal of a conceptual model of PHC service delivery. Further, we will implement and evaluate the results of implementation.