Description Directors of Health Centers of Primary Care in Chile

Abstract

Objective: To describe the profile of Directors of the Rural Health Centers, Health Centers and Urban Family Health Centers belonging to Primary Health Care in Chile. Materials and methods: Descriptive, cross-sectional, non experimental study. The stratified, random sample was extracted from region, with a universe of 506 directors. The data was analyzed by measures of frequency, central tendency and association between job quality and post-training through χ2 (p <0.05). Results: The average age of directors nationwide is 45 years old, and the 66.2% are women. The most frequent professions are: Medicine (21.2%), nursing (17.6%) and obstetrics (16.2%), most are in their positions as titular directors (76.6%). About how long they’ve been in their position, we get a median of 29.5 months, and 10 years of previous experience, 88.7% have some type of post-training in management and /or public health. Conclusions: In Chile we have managers in Primary Health Centers consolidated with previous experience and post-trained, so we have a highly technical specialized mass in this subsystem and it’s also a great capital for the next health challenges of our country.