Community Health Agents taking blood pressure: a useful primary care strategy?

Abstract

For many years, measuring the blood pressure was part of the routine of doctors and nurses. Lately, since the idea of a new professional category deeply involved with community work taking the blood pressure – the Community Health Agents -, this practice has become controversial in our country. In this paper we analyze the favorable opinions and criticisms regarding this proposal and study the literature dealing with the topic. We verified a strong demand of the public for this practice, including from the local and municipal health councils. The training of the CHA in blood pressure taking and educational actions in households was evaluated and specific schedules and guidelines were created and applied. The results obtained were: reproducibility of the technique used by the CHA, the number of people, who never before had their blood pressure measured, the number of cases considered high or borderline, the number of hypertensive people with poor control of their blood pressure and the adherence of users to the instructions of the CHA.