Abstract
This study aimed at characterizing social demographic aspects and health conditions of men attending a Primary Family Health Care unit in Montes Claros, MG, Brazil, correlating these variables with health self-perception and identifying men’s difficulty in using the health service. 115 adult men were interviewed who had attended the service in April and May, 2013. Most of them had completed high school, were married and adopted healthy practices, although they consumed alcoholic beverages. The main complaint regarding the health service was the long waiting time for attendance. The main factors that contributed for negative self-perception of health were: being married, suffering from chronic diseases and having low education; whereas those that contributed to the positive self-perception of health were: being young, being employed and not making regular use of medication (p<0.05). Those findings can subsidize policies to prevent diseases in promoting men’s health.
Highlights
The production of researches concerning man and his health, above all the ones directed to themes such as the access and use of services, profiles of morbidity/mortality and representations on health and diseases in specific social groups[1,2,3,4,5]
Many are the suppositions and justifications for the low attendance of men to the health services, and their inclusion in actions of such nature is a challenge, once they commonly do not recognize the importance of the care and the valuing of a healthy body as male social issues[1,7]
This study has as objective to characterize the health and social demographic conditions in a group of men assisted in a Basic Family Health Unit, correlating social demographic variables to the perception of health and identifying their difficulties concerning the assistance in the health services. It is a cross-sectional quantitative research, investigating the adult male population assisted at a basic health unit of Montes Claros, MG, Brazil, in April and May, 2013
Summary
The production of researches concerning man and his health, above all the ones directed to themes such as the access and use of services, profiles of morbidity/mortality and representations on health and diseases in specific social groups[1,2,3,4,5]. Statistics show that from each three deaths of adult people, two are men They live, in average, seven years less than the women, and among the main chronic diseases they present are cardiopathy, cancer, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia and arterial hypertension[6]. The matters concerning work, difficulty of access to the services, lack of units, which are turned to the health of men and representation of the care as a female task, are the main reasons expressed by the subjects for the low attendance to the services of health[2]
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