Metodología para la distribución del universo poblacional a las unidades operativas del Ministerio de Salud Pública utilizando software de sistemas de información geográfica caso de aplicación en la provincia de Pichincha.

摘要

The Ministry of Public Health has operating units responsible for providing health services tothe general population, this units are managed by the denominated “health areas“, which arethe set of units that belong to a health area under the criteria of accessibility, population andterritory of coverage. These criteria would be suitable if there was a clear perception of thearea assigned to the operating unit, and thus, its population of responsibility, unfortunately,there isn’t. The methodology for calculating and assigning population to an operating unit andto the health areas that the Ministry of Public Health manages is based on an estimate of thepercentage of a parish that would correspond to each unit in the parish, and since there is notalways a single unit in a parish, this percentage estimate is unreliable because it does not takeinto account the main criterion when assigning population of competency to a particularterritory: the territory. With the help of a software of Geographic Information Systems,ArcGIS 10, the official INEC (Census Institute) cartography at its most disaggregated levelavialable, the census tract, and the population data from the Census of Population and Housing2010, in this document is the methodological proposal for calculating the assigned populationof the operating units, and hence, the health areas, based on the mapping of the territories ofinfluence of the operating units and subsequent calculation of population for the units, the casestudy was applied in the province of Pichincha. The result is the comparison of assignedpopulation to the same area using the traditional methodology of the Public Health Ministryand the proposed methodology, and some application examples that demonstrate the problemsgenerated by taking actions in programs and politic based on poorly perceived territories andpopulations.