News

In the session "Management and evaluation of health services and technologies" of the XXXVI Annual Meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology (SEE) and XIII Congresso da Associação Portuguesa de Epidemiologia (APE) the oral communication was presented: "Knowledge and use of coordination mechanisms between levels of care in Latin America".  The work includes baseline data from the project, specifically from the COORDENA 2015 survey, and analyzes the care coordination mechanisms introduced to improve clinical coordination between primary and specialized care physicians and the quality of care in the six participating countries. The results show a high level of knowledge of the formal (consultation sheet, discharge report sheet) and informal (telephone and institutional e-mail) communication mechanisms, however there are wide differences between care levels and countries in their use. While clinical management coordination mechanisms (shared clinical practice guides, joint meetings) are generally less well known and rarely used. Difficulties were also identified in the use of mechanisms related, on the one hand, to factors specific to professionals and, on the other, to organisational and contextual factors. 

The conference took place from 12 to 14 September under the slogan "Epidemiology in a global context". The aim of this slogan was to make visible the influence of events occurring in a specific place on different groups and/or populations in different places, as well as the need to diversify actions in the field of public health. In this edition, 1,082 communications were presented, coming from 17 countries, with 17.4% from Latin America.