Resource dependency and community participation in primary health care

Great hope is accorded to community participation in health. A large number of potential benefits are attributed to participatory processes, including better addressing community needs through more locally adapted organizational processes and improvement in health outcomes. To this end, many governments around the world have adopted policies and programmes of community participation as part of their strategy to implement primary health care services. In Mexico this is, in great part, realized through the module programme of the Ministry of Health. A module is characterized by various village based health posts (casas de salud), each operated by a community volunteer and associated with a health committee, all of which are supervised by a nurse from a nearby health centre. The southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was chosen for a study of the module programme (during the period 1987-1992) to gain a better understanding of how organizational processes impact on the implementation and outcomes of community participation programmes in large institutions (i.e. the Ministry of Health). The resource dependency perspective formed the basis for the theoretical framework used. Some 75 towns and villages were visited and about 170 health related personnel from all over the state were interviewed to obtain data on the operation and impact of the module programme. As predicted by resource dependency theory, which postulates that organizations will react to pressures in their external environment to secure the resources needed for survival, the findings of this research led to the conclusion that the Ministry of Health had co-opted the resources of the communities it was involving in the module programme in order to meet its policy objectives, especially those related to expanding service coverage. Community participation in the module programme was found to have been implemented entirely for its utility in supplying resources and not for democratic or intrinsic values. This strategy, identified as the resource dependency approach to community participation, led to several flaws in the participatory process and resulted in far less than what could potentially have been achieved in terms of improving health outcomes. Ultimately, the participatory mechanisms became additional dependencies of the health system and not integral components of a process of community development. Large institutional programmes of community participation can benefit by understanding this approach and avoiding its inherent problems.