The social determinants of dental care for pregnant women from three districts of Bogotá

Objectives: The high prevalence of oral diseases, low coverage in dental care for pregnant women, the complications that oral infections generate over life, the health of the woman and her fetus, and the complexity involved in the process of dental care, motivated to analyze the social determinants of dental care of pregnant women who attended prenatal care at public institutions of Engativá, Suba and Usaquén in the second semester of 2012.
Methods: To do this, an investigation supported in critical epidemiology with a developed approach from the dialectical realism based on the fundamentals of Brehil was performed. In the developed process, intensive (deep interviews, observation, documentary analysis) and extensive techniques (from 798 surveys obtained from secondary sources) were triangulated.
Results: With the information, the critical processes matrix was developed, the social determination profile, the dynamics of the protective and destructive processes of social determination of dental care for pregnant women was defined, the dialectic and the subsumption of these processes to political, historical, social and geographical realities.
Conclusions: Thus concluding that while it is possible to identify protective processes both at the individual and collective domain, the predominance of destructive processes at all levels and domains explain the limitations of these pregnant women to access the dental care. This social determination mediated by the protective and destructive processes allows the contradictions that operate both in the natural dimension and social phenomena to be evident, and that is configured as a contradictory complex and dynamic scheme that links the individual and the collective of social determination of dental care of pregnant women from the three localities of the northern network of the Capital District.