A regionalização como instrumento de governança pública em saúde no estado do Paraná: análise dos vazios assistenciais como subsídio à ação do estado

Everyone has a right to health and the State’s duty is to provide it. SUS (unified health system) main principles are universalization, integrality and equality which are based on the decentralization, regionalization and hierarchization directives and shows the importance of a territorial perspective for planning healthcare actions. Decentralization was the strategy chosen to implant SUS, since municipalities were in charge of providing and organizing the municipal healthcare services. Nevertheless regionalization, that’s to say service, institution and practice integration, was not performed satisfactorily, thus jeopardizing the health system decision making process and causing disputes between municipalities over financial resources instead of developing an interdependent and cooperative net. This way, it is important to analyze if health regionalization has a good potential for being used as public governance tool. The present study aims at giving answers to the following research problem: What are the contributions of regionalism to the State of Paraná public governance applied to health? Besides that, it also aims at assessing the State of Parana health regionalization to identify healthcare gaps and help the State actions through public governance principles applied to healthcare. Therefore, the study used a quantitative-qualitative, exploratory and descriptive research, plus secondary data concerning bibliographic and documental research. The present study analyzed the current hospital bed distribution by compared to the ideal distribution allowing the identification of healthcare gaps in the regional healthcare centers, besides considering medical specialties in the State of Paraná. The study conclusion is that health regionalization is an important tool for reducing healthcare gaps concerning hospital beds permitting the use of seven to ten public governance principles applied to healthcare, as established in the present study, and shows health regionalization is an important pubic governance tool.