Quality of care for patients with hypertension and diabetes in the Northeast after the implementation of PMAQ-AB

Abstract

In order to improve health conditions, a program improving the quality of care in Brazil was created that encourages managers and teams to offer better quality health services to citizens of their territory by proposing strategies for training, monitoring, and evaluating the work of the health teams. The objective of this study was to analyze the morbidity and mortality indicators due to Systemic Arterial Hypertension and Diabetes Mellitus in the Northeast region of Brazil after the implementation of the first two cycles of the National Program to Improve Access and Quality of Primary Care. This is an ecological, retrospective study with spatial analysis, carried out in northeastern Brazil with data collected from the Informatics Department of the Unified Health System between the years 2012 and 2014. It was observed changes occurred in the spatial distribution areas concerning the hospitalization rates and the mortality rates, as well as the reduction of areas with high rates in 2014. When correlating with the Primary Care coverage, the areas with high rates of hospitalization and mortality also had high coverage of Primary Care. Thus, the effectiveness of implementing the aforementioned program reveals the need for plans that involve not only health promotion actions, but also professional training on how to integrate such actions into their daily activities, in order to ensure qualified and integral.

Keywords

• quality. access and evaluation of health care. hypertension. diabetes mellitus. morbidity and mortality indicators. primary health care.