Pharmacy Services in Rural Mexico: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Augmented Pharmaceutical Services in Rural Mexico

Abstract

<p>This thesis intends to study the effects of introducing a pharmacy-service-package in three health districts of the State of Tlaxcala, Mexico. Each district consists of several villages with rural health centres. They have small variation in size and their total economy and natural resources are almost equal. Districts have some features in common, none of them have experienced the "intervention" and all have the same health care system.</p> <p>The investigative method followed consists of randomly allocated intervention and then surveying the districts at two points in time, noting the changes that occur in the interim. Thus it basically requires two sets of observations, one for what might be called the before period (from 1977-1981), the other for what might be called the after period (1982-1983).</p> <p>These districts have already been studied by the University of Mexico. From this survey and auxilliary resources, enough information has been assembled that will be used to determine the initial health care conditions of the districts in the base line period. The investigation of the follow-up and terminal period are the author's responsibility. This work will consist of the designing of a study to collect comparable data and the designing of the analysis to provide evidence of the most important changes that will take place during the study.</p> <p>Chapter One contains an overview of Mexico. Chapter Two describes the current health care system in Mexican rural areas with emphasis on pharmaceutical services. A review of the literature is presented in Chapter Three. In an attempt to establish some basis for the design of a study, existent data is presented in Chapter Four. In this chapter also a proposed protocol presents the design of a definitive study to analyse the effects of pharmacy services in those districts.</p>