Distance from home to delivery hospital in children with birth defects in Bogota, Colombia
International Journal of Development Research
Distance from home to delivery hospital in children with birth defects in Bogota, Colombia
Received 10th February, 2020; Received in revised form 27th March, 2020; Accepted 29th April, 2020; Published online 30th May, 2020
Copyright © 2020, Catherin Tovar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Objectives: Evidence the geographical distribution of the children in Bogotá with BD between 2015 and 2016 from the SIVIGILA database using GIS. Perform a cartographic representation of the cases found and compare it with international data. Methods: Addresses from the BD database of SIVIGILA were verified using two mapping and spatial analysis software. The Euclidean distance between mother´s home and birth hospital was calculated in km. Results: Twenty-one cases of BD were geocoded. A map of the Euclidean distances between the birth hospital and the residency was made. A minimum distance of 0.46 km, maximum of 15.84 km, and an average of 7.71 km were calculated. Discussion: There is heterogeneity among the distancesin Bogota compared to international literature, where has been reported that more than 50% of patients lived less than 5 km from the hospital. We intend to continue using the GIS with our database to identify and map BD in Bogota and other cities in Colombia. Conclusions: The distances from home to delivery hospital in children with birth defects in Bogota are excessive, this must be taken into account to make public politics to improve accessibility to strategies that increase the quality of life of patients.