Documental review of community health promotion experiences in primary health care

Objective: Describe the community activities (CA) published or registered in health promotion networks in which Primary Health Care (PHC) has taken part. Design: Descriptive study, by documental review of experiences. Data source: articles, activities in exchange networks, presentations and funded projects. Selected experiences: The AC included were those where PHC and the local community were involved in its inception, development and/or evaluation, but not solitary actions with no continuity. Data extraction: The following variables were collected: Source and year of the document; region; municipality; name and number of health centres involved; target population; objectives; involvement of the community, the health and the non-health sectors; theoretical perspective and evaluation methods. Results: A total of 472 activities were found that met criteria, involving 300 health centres in most of the autonomous regions. Of those, 71.8% were registered in networks, and 19.3% were registered in articles. The most frequent target populations were: the general population (22.2%), youth (18.2%) and parents (10.2%). More than half (58.2%) had one or more of the following objectives: to empower the community to choose healthy behaviours; transmit health information to the population, or encourage self-care. In 33.3% of the activities there were no other sectors involved besides Primary Care. Of the remainder, non-health sectors participated in 53.8%, civic bodies in 26.9%, and government administration in 24.2%. Conclusions: Most of the CA are documented in networks and their presence is uneven by region. The involvement of sectors other than PHC in the activities identified is low. (C) 2009 Elsevier Espana, S.L. All rights reserved.