[Maternal-child health; the last 30 years]

The dynamics of the health policies of the last 30 years in Chile have been strongly influenced by the following issues: the achieved consciousness of the population that the access to health care is a human right; the important increase of the coverage of the health sector; the development of the human resources for health; and in the last decade the effect of the international recession that ultimately affected the financial situation of the Minister of Health and therefore leading to a stabilization of main health indexes. Other recent facts were the weakness of the normative central rol; the delegation of the primary health care to the mayor; the financing of local health services according to the number of consultancies (FAPEN), and the development of a system of private services (ISAPRES) for the higher income population, that concentrate a high proportion of the sector's resources.