Análisis de patrones territoriales de contextos de vida de niños hasta 6 años y su potencial influencia en la cobertura de programas de inmunización en Chile

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to analyze selected variables that could be involved in vaccination coverage of children in different communal territories of Chile, including the vaccines bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) at birth, pentavalent at 6 months and measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) at 12 months and 6 years, in the period 2008-2011. The methodology includes three phases. The first corresponds to the operationalization of twenty socio-territorial variables that account the general life contexts of the target population. The second phase involves the definition of a scale of values through a panel of experts to weigh the importance of each of the variables. The third phase integrates the information into a spatial decision support system for the identification of territorial patterns, through multi-criteria evaluation and multivariate cluster analysis. The results indicate that it is feasible to group territories into four types. In general terms, it is possible to observe that as the life context improves, higher levels of coverage can be found for each vaccine.