Community Health Profile Report of Indigenous people of Brazil

Community Health Profile Report of Indigenous people of Brazil

Community health profile is a developmental approach towards identifying the basic issues and causes of a community in the health segment. It sets the basic idea of these major issues on which the government and health agencies work to improve the health quality of that particular population by using the scarce resources of the community efficiently and effectively and by applying the principles of social justice and equity that are in practice (World Health Organization, 2001). This report is the profiling of the indigenous Brazilian community and includes the relevant information that will inform about the health situation and health needs of the indigenous population of Brazil. This will be done with the help of the social health determinants that will describe the factors that affect this population and along with the key characteristics of the population, health status, view of the local people regarding their health, the national and local priorities and the services being provided to the community (World Health Organization, 2001).

The Social Determinants of Health indicate the conditions in which the people are born, live, grow, work and age, and also show the causes of societal health dilemmas such as, depression, cardiac diseases, infections, etc., and also reflect upon the distribution of equity, power and social status (Catalyst, 2017). The profiling of the indigenous community of Brazil will be done through discussion at each step of the ten categories of the ‘SDH Assessment Circle’ (Clendon and Munns, 2018) as shown in figure 1 below:

The biological or genetic population of the indigenous of Brazil include over 890,000 people spread across the states which cover 12.5% of the country. This proportion of the indigenous population of Brazil is greatly diversified with 395 ethnic groups which speak 274 languages (Mendes et al., 2018). Due to the differences and diversities in culture, ethnicity lifestyles, there health care that exists is not of a single type, therefore, the health care policies and management is largely affected (Cecilio and Reis, 2018).

Brazil covers almost two-thirds of the Amazon forest and the indigenous territories are spread 1.11 million square km across the Amazon. The culture and needs of these people was connected to forestation, however, it has been largely affected by the influence of non-indigenous people, due to which the cultural strengths, values, beliefs, and needs of the indigenous of Brazil have changed. These cultural changes are in terms of views and ethnological patterns. Their values and needs changed in terms of decreased access to natural resources due to conservation and changes in family size, number of children and occupation (Campos et al., 2019).