Household Surveys At the Local Level : Tool to Improve PHC, the Case of the Sucre Municipality, Venezuela

The Primary Health Care strategy recognizes that a vast majority of health conditions are mediated by the influence of external factors to the health sector, such as the level of information and education, labor market, water and sanitation services. Solutions for many of the most frequent situations related to the PHC strategy, requires the utilization of adequate data and the design and implementation of interventions outside the health sector. At the local level, this intersection between data and policy decisions is more complex. Unfortunately, often there is a lack of data at the local level which impedes these interactions. 

Household surveys facilitate the gathering and utilization of adequate data to solve health problems at the local level, including those related to external factors. The presentation describes the results derived from a Household Survey to Monitoring Social Conditions in a major Municipality of Venezuela (population around 1,5 million inhabitants). It was the first household survey for this purpose implemented in the country at the local level (700 households, 2,800 individuals in the sample). The field work for the household survey was performed in August 2010.

Relevant results from the survey are: (1) in some sectors, 30% of households are located in areas of high physical vulnerability, (2) in poor sectors, water services are not available daily (in many cases they receive water once a week or less frequent), (3) garbage collection is almost inexistent in poor areas, (4) 80% of children between 2 and 6 years are not attending child care services, (5) less than 25% of the total population reaches secondary education. According to these results, the Sucre Municipality is implementing changes in previous programs or creating new ones to deal with these social gaps. The presentation describes the implications for policy derived from this first household survey.

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