Accessibility to Specialized Public Oral Health Services from the Perspective of Brazilian Users.

Ricardo De Castro,Marianne Rangel,Julyana Oliveira,Alessandro Cavalcanti,Marcos Da Silva,Paulo Bonan,Brunna De Lucena

doi:10.3390/ijerph13101026

Abstract

The Specialized Dental Clinics (SDCs) represent the first government initiative in Latin America aimed at providing specialized oral health services. This study sought to evaluate the organizational accessibility to specialized oral health care services in Brazil and to understand the factors that may be associated with accessibility from the user’s perspective. This epidemiological, cross-sectional and quantitative study was conducted by means of interviews with individuals who sought specialized public oral health services in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil, and consisted of a sample of 590 individuals. Users expressed a favorable view of the classification and resolutive nature of specialized services offered by Brazilian public health. The binary logistic regression analysis revealed weak points highlighting the difficulty involved in obtaining such treatments leading to unfavorable evaluations. In the resolutive nature item, difficulty in accessing the location, queues and lack of materials and equipment were highlighted as statistically significant unfavorable aspects. While many of the users considered the service to be resolutive, weaknesses were mentioned that need to be detected to promote improvements and to prevent other health models adopted worldwide from reproducing the same flaws.

Highlights

The study of the current organization and delivery of health services in Latin America involves an understanding of political and social contexts, which are strongly influenced by historical factors, marked by the state’s absence in the formulation of public health policies geared toward the interests of the majority
This epidemiological, cross-sectional, quantitative study sought to better understand factors relating to the access to specialized public oral health services in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil, which is located in the northeast of the country and has unfavorable social indicators, with a Human
Considering that the variable analyzed in this study—difficulty in obtaining dental care in specialized services—has an estimated prevalence of 13% in Northeast Brazilian adults [17], a sample of 590 individuals was deemed to have enough power for the proposed research

Summary

Introduction

The study of the current organization and delivery of health services in Latin America involves an understanding of political and social contexts, which are strongly influenced by historical factors, marked by the state’s absence in the formulation of public health policies geared toward the interests of the majority. The re-democratization process of the continent’s main countries seeks to overcome social inequalities, such as problems involving agrarian issues, indigenous people, high population densities in major cities and the precariousness of respect for human rights. These aspects are closely related to the concept of health and are translated into health planning and practices. Public Health 2016, 13, 1026; doi:10.3390/ijerph13101026 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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