ANALYSIS OF THE ROUTING‘S PERTINENCE TO AN ENDOCRINOLOGIST DURING A SOCIAL ACTION OF CLINICAL APPOINTMENTS IN ARATUBA, CEARA, BRAZIL

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: It is known that the Primary Health Care is not always enough to solve the case of some patients, which require routing to a medical specialty. Many of these routings are unnecessary, causing a series of problems to the public system of health and to the patients. Thus, this study has the goal to analyze the resolution capability of Primary Health Care in cases of endocrine diseases. METHOD: Cross analytical quantitative study made in a social action of clinical appointments at the city of Aratuba, Ceara, Brazil. The data collection was made through a semi-structure questionnaire containing data about the patients (sex, age and education), the time past in the waiting row for the medical appointments, the disease that motivated the routing and the pertinence of the reference to an endocrinologist. The study included patients that signed The Free Consent and Informed Terms and excluded patients that refused to join the research or with incomplete questionnaires. The data were analyzed and interpreted using the SPSS Statistics Base software. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The answers of sixty one questionnaires were analyzed resulting in the following ratios: 29.5% were men, 70.5% were women, 40.78 was the middle age found, 41% of the patients waited for medical appointment for at least a year, 18% of the cases didn’t need to be forwarded to the expert. Therefore, there was an unnecessary demand for clinical appointments with the endocrinologist, causing a longer waiting time for referred patients and a loss of care to those who really needed the specialist evaluation.