Which Type of Facility Are You?
Which Type of Facility Are You?
Four Facility Types, Not One
The same four-category model built for ASF's Hospital standard applies here, with one deliberate change: Small is anchored to a genuine, real-world unit for primary care — a single doctor. Primary care, unlike a hospital or a 24-hour residential facility, can be and very often is delivered by exactly one physician, especially in rural and crisis-affected settings.
Standard (ST)
A fully resourced, functioning primary health clinic — a full multi-provider team, on-site diagnostics, no adaptation needed.
Small (SM) — where staffing depth, not crisis or poverty, is the defining constraint
Exactly one doctor is the confirmed anchor. This is not a research threshold requiring external verification — it is the plain, real unit of primary care itself: a solo family physician, otherwise stable, genuinely limited only by being one person doing what a larger team would otherwise share.
Transitional (TR)
Real national resource or infrastructure limitation, no active conflict — the same World Bank-anchored logic used throughout ASF's standards.
Crisis (CR)
Active conflict or humanitarian emergency — overrides every other consideration, exactly as in the Hospital standard.
The Universal Floor
A small number of criteria apply in full, in every one of the four types, with no exceptions: correct patient identification, genuine hand hygiene, real informed consent, dignity and non-discrimination, and — specific to primary care — genuine continuity, meaning a patient's own medical history is actually known and used, not treated as a new encounter every visit.
Which Type of Primary Health Clinic Are You?
Answer these questions in order, top to bottom. The moment you answer YES, stop — that is your answer. If you reach the end still answering NO, you are Standard.
| WORK DOWN THIS LIST. STOP AT YOUR FIRST YES. | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Is your country in an active war, armed conflict, or a declared humanitarian emergency right now? This means fighting, displacement, or a declared emergency is actually happening now — not that things are generally difficult. |
☐ YES → CR CRISIS |
☐ NO → next question |
| 2 | Does your national government struggle badly to fund healthcare, or is national power or medicine supply unreliable — even though there is no war or crisis? This is about your country as a whole, not just your own facility. |
☐ YES → TR TRANSITIONAL |
☐ NO → next question |
| 3 | Is your clinic staffed by exactly one doctor, and is that the main reason you cannot offer certain services — for example, same-day coverage during your own absence, or a broader range of on-site chronic disease management? This applies even in a stable, well-funded country. A genuine solo practice, not a small team — the limit here is being one person, nothing else. |
☐ YES → SM SMALL |
☐ NO → next question |
| If you answered NO to all three questions above: You are STANDARD (ST) — no crisis, no national constraint, and staffing depth is not holding you back. |
|||
THIS IS ME
| My type: ☐ CR ☐ TR ☐ SM ☐ ST |
Example: A solo family doctor in rural Moldova — no active conflict, so NO to question 1. National healthcare funding is genuinely unreliable, so YES to question 2. Stop there. This clinic is TR.
Primary Health Clinic Standards — overviewFacility Classification — Which Type of Facility Are You?Standard 1 — Patient Registration & Continuity of CareStandard 2 — Preventive Care & ScreeningStandard 3 — Chronic Disease ManagementStandard 4 — Acute & Same-Day CareStandard 5 — Referral & Care CoordinationStandard 6 — Clinical Environment & SafetyStandard 7 — Governance & StaffingStandard 8 — Health & MigrationReferences & Index
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