Informações em saúde : o uso do SIAB pelos profissionais das equipes de saúde da família

Abstract

Family Health Care Strategy (ESF) has been adopted as a model of care reorientation, operating by the establishment of the multi-professional teams in basic health care units. These teams are in charge of following the precise number of families dwelling in a given geographic area. ESF is a dynamic project that has been conditioned by the historical evolution and the organization of the Brazilian health care system. It has promoted an important movement in an effort to reorder the health care model aiming at reasoning in the use of other care levels with positive results in main health care measures. The remarkable expansion of ESF and the discussion of issues related to the amount of the collected data stimulated the need for designing an information system that embraced the complex organization of basic health care. So, in 1998, the Basic Health Care Information System (SIAB) was founded. SIAB was developed in order to bring in information, help and facilitate the decision-making process related to a single person and families since it makes a set of information available for the family health care teams, coordinators and local health care managers, besides supporting the election of priority actions addressed to some particular communities, and based on the needs of these populations. This research aimed at investigating the use of SIAB by the professional teams of the Family Health Care as well as characterizing these professionals by identifying the difficulties and advantages they find in the use of this system, frequency and purpose of its use, and moreover, examining the staff?s qualifications for its use. A questionnaire was applied to 75 professionals belonging to 10 teams. Besides, 5 o these teams were observed in 5 weeks, one week each. In the obtained results concerning the characterization of these professionals, 82,7% was females at the ages of 31 and 50 (66,7%); 89,3% of these professionals reported that their work length in ESF was longer or the same as 2 years, and 81,3% working in EESF was the same or longer than 2 years. Out of the 75 interviewees, 47 defined SIAB as a 10 "database". Regarding their qualifications, most of them answered that they had been previously qualified in their workplace (65%); 15% reported that they had been qualified by the Municipal Heath Secretary (SESA), and 20% said that they had never been qualified. For most of them, the purpose of the use of SIAB by these professionals is to register families and reports. When they were asked about any possible difficulties in managing SIAB, 34% was assertive and 52% said that there is available time for discussion, and 49% of them takes part in it. Furthermore, 57% of these professionals said that SIAB is a system that is able to bring in information to describe the assisted populations. It showed as evidence that the Family Health Care teams that participated in this research have not used the available information for planning or assessing their health care services, and so, they have missed the opportunity of using the available information for health care local needs.