Dataset Information

Mortality associated with alternative primary healthcare policies: a nationwide microsimulation modelling study in Brazil.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Brazil's Estratégia Saúde da Família (ESF) is one of the largest and most robustly evaluated primary healthcare programmes of the world, but it could be affected by fiscal austerity measures and by the possible end of the Mais Médicos programme (MMP)-a major intervention to increase primary care doctors in underserved areas. We forecast the impact of alternative scenarios of ESF coverage changes on under-70 mortality from ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (ACSCs) until 2030, the date for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Method

A synthetic cohort of 5507 Brazilian municipalities was created for the period 2017-2030. A municipal-level microsimulation model was developed and validated using longitudinal data and estimates from a previous retrospective study evaluating the effects of municipal ESF coverage on mortality rates. Reductions in ESF coverage, and its effects on ACSC mortality, were forecast based on two probable austerity scenarios, compared with the maintenance of the current coverage or the expansion to 100%. Fixed effects longitudinal regression models were employed to account for secular trends, demographic and socioeconomic changes, healthcare-related variables, and programme duration effects.

Results

Under austerity scenarios of decreasing ESF coverage with and without the MMP termination, mean ACSC mortality rates would be 8.60% (95% CI 7.03-10.21%; 48,546 excess premature/under-70 deaths along 2017-2030) and 5.80% (95% CI 4.23-7.35%; 27,685 excess premature deaths) higher respectively in 2030 compared to maintaining the current ESF coverage. Comparing decreasing ESF coverage and MMP termination with achieving 100% ESF coverage (Universal Health Coverage scenario) in 2030, mortality rates would be 11.12% higher (95% CI 9.47-12.76%; 83,937 premature deaths). Reductions in ESF coverage would have stronger effects on mortality from infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies and would disproportionately impact poorer municipalities, with the concentration index for ACSC mortality 11.77% higher (95% CI 0.31-22.32%) and also ending historical declines in racial health inequalities between white and black/pardo Brazilians.

Conclusions

Reductions in primary healthcare coverage due to austerity measures are likely to be responsible for many avoidable deaths and may preclude achievement of SDGs for health and inequality in Brazil and in other low- and middle-income countries.

SUBMITTER: Rasella D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6485171 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Mortality associated with alternative primary healthcare policies: a nationwide microsimulation modelling study in Brazil.

Rasella Davide D Hone Thomas T de Souza Luis Eugenio LE Tasca Renato R Basu Sanjay S Millett Christopher C

BMC medicine 20190426 1

<h4>Background</h4>Brazil's Estratégia Saúde da Família (ESF) is one of the largest and most robustly evaluated primary healthcare programmes of the world, but it could be affected by fiscal austerity measures and by the possible end of the Mais Médicos programme (MMP)-a major intervention to increase primary care doctors in underserved areas. We forecast the impact of alternative scenarios of ESF coverage changes on under-70 mortality from ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (ACSCs) until 2030 ...[more]

PMID: 31023330

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Project description:BackgroundSince 2015, a major economic crisis in Brazil has led to increasing poverty and the implementation of long-term fiscal austerity measures that will substantially reduce expenditure on social welfare programmes as a percentage of the country's GDP over the next 20 years. The Bolsa Família Programme (BFP)-one of the largest conditional cash transfer programmes in the world-and the nationwide primary healthcare strategy (Estratégia Saúde da Família [ESF]) are affected by fiscal austerity, despite being among the policy interventions with the strongest estimated impact on child mortality in the country. We investigated how reduced coverage of the BFP and ESF-compared to an alternative scenario where the level of social protection under these programmes is maintained-may affect the under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and socioeconomic inequalities in child health in the country until 2030, the end date of the Sustainable Development Goals.Methods and findingsWe developed and validated a microsimulation model, creating a synthetic cohort of all 5,507 Brazilian municipalities for the period 2017-2030. This model was based on the longitudinal dataset and effect estimates from a previously published study that evaluated the effects of poverty, the BFP, and the ESF on child health. We forecast the economic crisis and the effect of reductions in BFP and ESF coverage due to current fiscal austerity on the U5MR, and compared this scenario with a scenario where these programmes maintain the levels of social protection by increasing or decreasing with the size of Brazil's vulnerable populations (policy response scenarios). We used fixed effects multivariate regression models including BFP and ESF coverage and accounting for secular trends, demographic and socioeconomic changes, and programme duration effects. With the maintenance of the levels of social protection provided by the BFP and ESF, in the most likely economic crisis scenario the U5MR is expected to be 8.57% (95% CI: 6.88%-10.24%) lower in 2030 than under fiscal austerity-a cumulative 19,732 (95% CI: 10,207-29,285) averted under-five deaths between 2017 and 2030. U5MRs from diarrhoea, malnutrition, and lower respiratory tract infections are projected to be 39.3% (95% CI: 36.9%-41.8%), 35.8% (95% CI: 31.5%-39.9%), and 8.5% (95% CI: 4.1%-12.0%) lower, respectively, in 2030 under the maintenance of BFP and ESF coverage, with 123,549 fewer under-five hospitalisations from all causes over the study period. Reduced coverage of the BFP and ESF will also disproportionately affect U5MR in the most vulnerable areas, with the U5MR in the poorest quintile of municipalities expected to be 11.0% (95% CI: 8.0%-13.8%) lower in 2030 under the maintenance of BFP and ESF levels of social protection than under fiscal austerity, compared to no difference in the richest quintile. Declines in health inequalities over the last decade will also stop under a fiscal austerity scenario: the U5MR concentration index is expected to remain stable over the period 2017-2030, compared to a 13.3% (95% CI: 5.6%-21.8%) reduction under the maintenance of BFP and ESF levels of protection. Limitations of our analysis are the ecological nature of the study, uncertainty around future macroeconomic scenarios, and potential changes in other factors affecting child health. A wide range of sensitivity analyses were conducted to minimise these limitations.ConclusionsThe implementation of fiscal austerity measures in Brazil can be responsible for substantively higher childhood morbidity and mortality than expected under maintenance of social protection-threatening attainment of Sustainable Development Goals for child health and reducing inequality.

Project description:BackgroundUniversal health coverage (UHC) can play an important role in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10, which addresses reducing inequalities, but little supporting evidence is available from low- and middle-income countries. Brazil's Estratégia de Saúde da Família (ESF) (family health strategy) is a community-based primary healthcare (PHC) programme that has been expanding since the 1990s and is the main platform for delivering UHC in the country. We evaluated whether expansion of the ESF was associated with differential reductions in mortality amenable to PHC between racial groups.Methods and findingsMunicipality-level longitudinal fixed-effects panel regressions were used to examine associations between ESF coverage and mortality from ambulatory-care-sensitive conditions (ACSCs) in black/pardo (mixed race) and white individuals over the period 2000-2013. Models were adjusted for socio-economic development and wider health system variables. Over the period 2000-2013, there were 281,877 and 318,030 ACSC deaths (after age standardisation) in the black/pardo and white groups, respectively, in the 1,622 municipalities studied. Age-standardised ACSC mortality fell from 93.3 to 57.9 per 100,000 population in the black/pardo group and from 75.7 to 49.2 per 100,000 population in the white group. ESF expansion (from 0% to 100%) was associated with a 15.4% (rate ratio [RR]: 0.846; 95% CI: 0.796-0.899) reduction in ACSC mortality in the black/pardo group compared with a 6.8% (RR: 0.932; 95% CI: 0.892-0.974) reduction in the white group (coefficients significantly different, p = 0.012). These differential benefits were driven by greater reductions in mortality from infectious diseases, nutritional deficiencies and anaemia, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in the black/pardo group. Although the analysis is ecological, sensitivity analyses suggest that over 30% of black/pardo deaths would have to be incorrectly coded for the results to be invalid. This study is limited by the use of municipal-aggregate data, which precludes individual-level inference. Omitted variable bias, where factors associated with ESF expansion are also associated with changes in mortality rates, may have influenced our findings, although sensitivity analyses show the robustness of the findings to pre-ESF trends and the inclusion of other municipal-level factors that could be associated with coverage.ConclusionsPHC expansion is associated with reductions in racial group inequalities in mortality in Brazil. These findings highlight the importance of investment in PHC to achieve the SDGs aimed at improving health and reducing inequalities.

Project description:ObjectivesTo evaluate the impact of Brazil's recently implemented Family Health Program (FHP), the largest primary health care programme in the world, on heart and cerebrovascular disease mortality across Brazil from 2000 to 2009.DesignEcological longitudinal design, evaluating the impact of FHP using negative binomial regression models for panel data with fixed effects specifications.SettingNationwide analysis of data from Brazilian municipalities covering the period from 2000 to 2009.Data sources1622 Brazilian municipalities with vital statistics of adequate quality.Main outcome measuresThe annual FHP coverage and the average FHP coverage in previous years were used as main independent variables and classified as none (0%), incipient (<30%), intermediate (30-69%), or consolidated (≥ 70%). Age standardised mortality rates from causes in the group of cerebrovascular (ICD-10 codes I60-69), ischaemic (ICD-10 I20-25), and other forms of heart diseases (ICD-10 I30-52), which were included in the national list of ambulatory care-sensitive conditions, were calculated for each municipality for each year. They accounted for 40% of all deaths from these groups during the study period.ResultsFHP coverage was negatively associated with mortality rates from cerebrovascular and heart diseases (ambulatory care-sensitive conditions) in both unadjusted and adjusted models for demographic, social, and economic confounders. The FHP had no effect on the mortality rate for accidents, used as a control. The rate ratio for the effect of consolidated annual FHP coverage on cerebrovascular disease mortality and on heart disease mortality was 0.82 (95% confidence interval 0.79 to 0.86) and 0.79 (0.75 to 0.80) respectively, reaching the value of 0.69 (0.66 to 0.73) and 0.64 (0.59 to 0.68) when the coverage was consolidated during all the previous eight years. Moreover, FHP coverage increased the number of health education activities, domiciliary visits, and medical consultations and reduced hospitalisation rates for cerebrovascular and heart disease. Several complementary analyses showed quantitatively similar results.ConclusionsComprehensive and community based primary health care programmes, such as the FHP in Brazil, acting through cardiovascular disease prevention, care, and follow-up can contribute to decreased cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality in a developing country such as Brazil.

Project description:There is a plethora of interventions and policies aimed at changing practice habits of primary healthcare professionals, but it is unclear which are the most appropriate, sustainable, and effective. We aimed to evaluate the evidence on behavior change interventions and policies directed at healthcare professionals working in primary healthcare centers.Study design: overview of reviews.MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), The Cochrane Library (Wiley), CINAHL (EbscoHost), and grey literature (January 2005 to July 2015).two reviewers independently, and in duplicate, identified systematic reviews, overviews of reviews, scoping reviews, rapid reviews, and relevant health technology reports published in full-text in the English language.two reviewers extracted data pertaining to the types of reviews, study designs, number of studies, demographics of the professionals enrolled, interventions, outcomes, and authors' conclusions for the included studies. We evaluated the methodological quality of the included studies using the AMSTAR scale. For the comparative evaluation, we classified interventions according to the behavior change wheel (Michie et al.).Of 2771 citations retrieved, we included 138 reviews representing 3502 individual studies. The majority of systematic reviews (91%) investigated behavior and practice changes among family physicians. Interactive and multifaceted continuous medical education programs, training with audit and feedback, and clinical decision support systems were found to be beneficial in improving knowledge, optimizing screening rate and prescriptions, enhancing patient outcomes, and reducing adverse events. Collaborative team-based policies involving primarily family physicians, nurses, and pharmacists were found to be most effective. Available evidence on environmental restructuring and modeling was found to be effective in improving collaboration and adherence to treatment guidelines. Limited evidence on nurse-led care approaches were found to be as effective as general practitioners in patient satisfaction in settings like asthma, cardiovascular, and diabetes clinics, although this needs further evaluation. Evidence does not support the use of financial incentives to family physicians, especially for long-term behavior change.Behavior change interventions including education, training, and enablement in the context of collaborative team-based approaches are effective to change practice of primary healthcare professionals. Environmental restructuring approaches including nurse-led care and modeling need further evaluation. Financial incentives to family physicians do not influence long-term practice change.

Dataset Information

Mortality associated with alternative primary healthcare policies: a nationwide microsimulation modelling study in Brazil.

Background

Method

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Mortality associated with alternative primary healthcare policies: a nationwide microsimulation modelling study in Brazil.

Similar Datasets

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