Social Cohesion and Health

Changes in population dynamics presents new challenges in healthcare of the Latin American population. The region's countries have implemented various policies to improve public health outcomes, especially primary care, lower infant mortality and causes of maternal mortality and largely preventable diseases. In addition to efforts to achieve this, we found several factors associated to political activity, that is, the implementation of programs that can easily translate into visible results and citizen satisfaction with government actions. These efforts to maintain the equilibrium in social cohesion have, in some Countries of Latin America, interesting paradoxes in terms of the expected effects on the results. This essay addresses some of the factors that affect infant and maternal mortality in the region, through principal components and cluster analysis, as well as some aspects related to the perception of the population health services. We developed an index of availability of services and risk factors for health. Also, we make a comparison with the ranking made by PAHO which discusses some of the advances in health policies based on access and other variables that allow us to get closer to understanding the fundamental social factors of health.