A contribution to the assessment of the Primary Health Care in the user's viewpoint

Abstract

The evaluation seen through the user's perspective is an essential part of evaluations of health services. The final goal is knowing about the user's perspective on the care received and offer subsidies to improve the quality of the service offered. The conceptual and methodological polysemy on this topic is wide and requires great efforts for theorizing. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the development of a methodology to evaluate, through the user's perspective, the quality of services provided by the Primary Care. This way, a review about the dimensions and indicators and nine instruments of evaluation of user´s perspective. Then, they were subjected to expert judgment using the Delphi technique. Experts agreed on 14 dimensions and 56 measurement elements. The dimensions were judged by degrees of relevance, being considered as most relevant: access/accessibility / availability, professional-user relationship and information. An overview of the evaluation of methodologies, through the user's perspective was made, as well as a framework for the construction of one or more instruments of evaluation in which the size of the instrument could be controlled based on the relevance of the items.