IS IT REALLY FEASIBLE TO PERFORM A PCAT-STUDY IN A SMALL RURAL CITY IN BRAZIL?

Introduction and Objective Decentralization of health services is one of the pillars of the Brazilian public health care system: each of the 5570 cities is directly responsible for providing Primary Health Care (PHC) services its citizens, even in small cities in remote and difficult access areas. The Primary Care Assessment Tool (PCAT) is a reliable tool to evaluate PHC services and has been adapted and validated in Brazil. The objective of the study is to assess if it is really feasible to perform a PCAT-study to evaluate the performance of the Primary Health Care-services for children in a small rural Brazilian city. Methods In a cross-sectional survey the PCATool-Brasil was applied to 7 health professionals and 502 caretakers. Feasibility of the PCAT-study was described in terms of invested man-hours, budget and the timeline. Results and Conclusions This PCAT-study was performed with 1.241 man hours, a budget of R$ 12.900,00 (equivalent to 3.181,00 USD) in a time span of 4 years. There are difficulties in performing a PCAT-study in a small rural city. Firstly there is no financing available to do so. Secondly calculating PCAT-scores is time consuming. And last but not least, performing research in a rural area often is a challenge: communication can be difficult, distance to university or research centers is long, public transport is inexistent etc. Also practical problems had to be solved, such as the small space in a health center that have to be divided by the researchers and the health staff.