Assessment of the association between the qualification of physicians and nurses in primary healthcare and the quality of care

This study sought to establish the association between the attributes of primary healthcare (PHC) and the professional qualification of physicians and nurses. For data collection, the child version of the Primary Care Assessment Tool (Child PCA-Tool) was applied to the caregivers of children resident and registered in the areas covered by the family health teams. The attributes of PHC were evaluated using the scores of the caregivers in the test. After bivariate analysis, seeking an association between the degree of orientation to the PHC and the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, as well as the professional characteristics of the health units, a multivariate model was established using Poisson regression. The teams in which there were professionals with residence in family health or family and community medicine achieved higher scores than those in which the professionals did not have this qualification. The authors concluded that specialization in residence in family and community medicine for physicians, and residence in family health for nurses, have higher potential for the transformation of the care model, based on the attributes of the PHC.