[Expenditure evaluation of the construction of health units: example of community participation]

Demonstrate the economic benefits that community participation may render in the construction of health units.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the efficiency in the construction of 21 auxiliary health units and 81 rural health built through the Program to Support the Development of Health Services for the Non-Insured Population (PASSPA) through three different construction models (national public bidding, restricted invitation and community participation). Comparisons were also made with the units built through regular construction procedures of the Ministry of Health and other institutions. To evaluate the expenditure/m2, a univariate analysis using non-parametric statistics and a mathematical model of bootstrapping were used.

The median expenditure/m2 and the delivery times for auxiliary health units, and the median expenditure/m2 for rural health units were smaller when using community participation. The expenditure/m2 of those units built through PASSPA was considerably lower than that of health units built through regular construction procedures.

The use of community participation in the construction of auxiliary health units and rural health units may impact positively the resource investment and the delivery times when compared with units built through national public biddings and restricted invitations. The possibility of using community participation in other health activities (supervision, maintenance) should be evaluated. The English version of this paper is available at:http://www.insp.mx/salud/index.html.