Inequality in pre-hospital care in Brazil: Analysis of the efficiency and sufficiency of SAMU 192 coverage

The scope of this article is to analyze the evolution and coverage of pre-hospital care in Brazil between 2015 and 2019 based on efficiency and sufficiency in all municipalities, according to macro-regions, population covered, situation and coverage strategy, geographic area covered, available modalities and mobile resources distributed. It is an observational, quantitative, descriptive, and exploratory census, conducted with data provided by the Ministry of Health, complemented with data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Efficiency in pre-hospital coverage was analyzed according to 17 indicators linked to the population covered, distribution of mobile resources and configuration of teams by modality. Sufficiency was analyzed according to variations in these indicators between municipalities in different macro-regions of the country. In 5 years, coverage rose by 5.4%, attaining 85% of citizens and 3750 municipalities, with a predominance of the Basic Life Support modality. The meager expansion of pre-hospital care and the persistence of uncovered municipalities denote the inefficiency of coverage which, associated with the inequality in the distribution of resources and modalities, corrupts the guidelines of integrality and equality in access to health (sufficiency).