Impacto da política de atenção básica a saúde na taxa de mortalidade infantil nos municípios brasileiros.

Abstract

The research was carried out to evaluate the impact of Primary Health Care Policy, in particular the Family Health Strategy, the rate of infant mortality in Brazilian municipalities. This is an empirical evaluation of the efficacy and effectiveness of primary care, with the unit of analysis, the municipalities of the country and geographical regions. The dependent variable used in this study was the infant mortality rate; municipalities with family health strategy throughout the period analyzed, vaccination coverage and sanitation conditions: as explanatory variables the following indicators were used. The following control variables were also entered: the human development index, the Gini index, the rate of urbanization and population. Data were collected from the Department of the Unified Health System, United Nations Program for Development and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Methodologically, we divided the municipalities into two groups, the first refers to those who received the family health teams throughout the program period. The second group are those municipalities that had never received such teams or have received and suffered outages. In this latter group, it was found that on average the rate of infant mortality was higher at around 10%. The Northeast and Southeast regions are among the regions with the highest number of municipalities that did not undergo oscillations in the time of joining the program, now called family health strategy; Therefore, these regions showed the lowest infant mortality rate (lower than the national average percentage - 18.62). In the inferential model, it was found that there is indeed statistically signifícant, pointing to a negative causal relationship between family health strategy and infant mortality rate. Thus, the results suggest that the greater access to primary care to lower infant mortality. This study sets up on one of the few studies about the reality of Brazilian municipalities and geographical áreas of the country that bring a pioneer in evidence on the impact of primary care on infant mortality.