Caracterización y condiciones de los cuidadores de niños y niñas menores de cinco años del departamento de Cundinamarca en el marco de la encuesta de calidad de vida ECV realizada en el 2018

Abstract

The first years of life are final for all human beings, it is at this stage that children experience changes and suffer cognitive, emotional, physical and social transformations that guide ways of interacting, learning, communicating and navigating their environment, this is how personality, intelligence, attitudes and behaviour are established. For this reason, it is essential to guarantee them a healthy development in an environment that satisfies their emotional, nutritional, health and educational needs, always bearing in mind their rights. In this context, their care becomes a fundamental life process for boys and girls’ health and integral development. Therefore, a study was developed aiming to characterize caregivers of children under five years from the department of Cundinamarca in the frame of the survey “Quality of life”, which was carried out in 2018. Regarding the methodology it is a descriptive cross-sectional study that uses secondary sources that allowed to analyze and compare socioeconomic conditions of caregivers with access to some child health services. The observation unit was the home; Carrying out analyses of the publicly accessible micro data from the 2018 National “Quality of life” Survey allowed us to analyze caregivers’ characteristics from the health and care modules for children under five years. This is how this research yielded very valuable results, after analyzing 664 households with specific characteristics finding in a large proportion that they are house type, located in the municipal capitals. Regarding the place or person whom children under 5 years stay most of the time during the week, the results of the 2018 ECV for the department of Cundinamarca show that 57.23% were care by their father or mother at home. 91.87% of the minors stayed with a person from the same household after attending the community home, garden, child development center or school, or during most of the time during the weekdays. It was also found that 95.63% of the minors have complete vaccination schedules and 91.42% of the minors were taken to growth and development controls; rigorous actions that allowed adequate monitoring of the minors’ growth process. The present study allowed us to carry out a rich construction of knowledge, achieving important levels of understanding of some realities of children under five years in the department of Cundinamarca, at the same time being able to explain the results found; and predict in some way the actions that could be oriented around improving the health and living conditions of minors and their caregivers.