The access of the homeless persons with tuberculosis to the health care: an integrative review

Abstract

Introduction: The Tuberculosis (TB) keeps being a big public health problem in the world, having the poverty, the bad life condition, the bad income distribution, the social iniquity and the disability on the health system as a substrate to its maintenance.Objective: To identify the scientific knowledge produced under the access to the health service of the homeless person sick by TB. Method:Integrative literature review conducted from April to June, 2016, having as inclusion criteria: publications written in Portuguese, English or Spanish, published from 1990 to 2015, indexed on the data basis: LILACS, SciELO, MEDLINE and Web of Science and portals Virtual Health Library (VHL) and MEDLINE/PubMed, that had the text completely available online. The data analyzes was made in qualitative terms, using the technique of content analysis proposed by Bardin, it was possible to construct three categories: Specific characteristics of the homeless people access to the health services to tuberculosis diagnostic and treatment; Access difficulty to the health care: factors related to homeless people and factors related to health services; Strategies to overcome the access difficulties of the homeless person (HLP) to the health care. Results:Pointed that the homeless people have a higher risk to get sick by TB, presenting TB incidence rate 10 to 20 times higher than the general population. Many obstacles that limited those people access to the health services were identified. Many times they presented difficulty to identify the appropriated place to search for assistance and not always this place had the opened doors to this social group.