PRIMARY CARE IN LEPROSY CONTROL: EVALUATIVE STUDY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF MANAGERS IN A MUNICIPALITY IN THE HINTERLAND OF PARAÍBA

Abstract

Leprosy, despite the advances of recent decades, is still a public health problem, even though it is a curable disease, with means for early diagnosis, effective and free treatment. Brazil is among the 22 countries that have the highest burden of the disease globally, the state of Paraíba has high rates of detection of the disease and the municipality of study, Cajazeiras-PB, located in the largest cluster of agglomeration of the disease in the state, was considered hyperendemic in the years 2010 to 2016, also having  high detection rates. Thus, the Family Health Strategy should be organized to offer disease control actions according to the attributes of primary health care, considering that the measures should be based on reducing the burden of leprosy in the population, through the performance of managers, technicians and health professionals in the elaboration of state plans,  regional and municipal actions for strategic actions to be developed. Therefore, the objective is to analyze the performance of the municipality of Cajazeiras-PB through an evaluative instrument in primary health care in relation to the implementation of leprosy control actions from the perspective of managers. To this end, an evaluative research of a quantitative nature was developed with the following management professionals: Municipal Health Secretary, PHC Coordinator, Epidemiological Surveillance Coordinator and PHC Unit Managers, using an instrument composed of 8 attributes to form scores of managers and the municipality under study. From this, weaknesses were observed between the evaluation attributes, such as "access" and "professional guidance", as well as among the dispersion measures that highlighted relative inconsistency between the answers provided in the face of the reality of the municipality. Thus, even with an overall score of 7.58 considered adequate according to the PCATool-Brazil standardization, the municipality presented dispersion measures with relative heterogeneity, suggesting that not all aspects evaluated were above the values considered positive. In view of this, the realization of this research enables the identification of specific weaknesses and the search for solutions with regard to the vulnerabilities that permeate the actions of managers in the control of leprosy in the municipality of Cajazeiras-PB.