Compliance with punctuality guarantees (GES) for technical assistance in an urban county of the Metropolitan Region

Objective: The system of explicit health guarantees (GES) covers priority health problems. The objective of the study was to evaluate compliance with the guarantee of punctuality of technical assistance in three health centers in an urban community in the Metropolitan Region. Materials and methods: Non experimental descriptive study, which used measures of frequency, median, 5-75 percentile and interquartile range. The data was analyzed with SPSS 17.0 for Windows, with Kruskal-Wallis to establish differences in compliance among health centers (p<0.05). All technical assistance provisions in Sigges between January 1, 2007 until January 13, 2011 were included. According to the type of technical assistance, the sample was organized in two groups, group 1, assistance with a time limit of 20 days (n = 473) and group 2, assistance with a limit of 90 days (n = 406). Results: Of all assistance from group 1, only 45.7 per cent were fulfilled within the time limits established by GES. In group 2, compliance was 68.7 per cent. Conclusions: The percentage of compliance with the guarantee of punctuality for the first group accounted for less than half of all assistance in that group, and although compliance was better in the second group, almost a third of all assistance in that group did not comply with the time limits established by law.