Quality of public health services in San Salvador

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the quality of care in health services in the city of San Salvador.
For this, an instrument was designed based on the theoretical model suggested by Donabedian (1966), which contains the dimensions of structure, process-result and accessibility. It is a descriptive study by means of a survey (León and Montero, 2007), its retrospective design; the sample is non-probabilistic of incidental type, constituted by 1.21 O people between men (42.1%) and women (57.9%) with an average age of 32.5 years.
The results show that the questionnaire (ECASS) has adequate psychometric properties of reliability and validity; Likewise, it was found that there are significant differences in the quality of health care, between private and public care centers, indicating that care in private centers is of better quality.
Some indicators considered as negative: poor attention in the Salvadoran public health system (63.4%); the waiting times between one appointment and another are very long; (70.8%). In the public health system, access to the specialist doctor is extremely difficult (68.4%). The results can serve as parameters so that, based on them, improvements in the public health care process can be implemented.