[Documental review of community health promotion experiences in primary health care].

OBJECTIVE: Describe the community activities (CA) published or registered in health promotion networks in which Primary Health Care (PHC) has taken part.
DESIGN: Descriptive study, by documental review of experiences. DATA SOURCE: articles, activities in exchange networks, presentations and funded projects. SELECTED EXPERIENCES: The AC included were those where PHC and the local community were involved in its inception, development and/or evaluation, but not solitary actions with no continuity. DATA EXTRACTION: The following variables were collected: Source and year of the document; region; municipality; name and number of health centres involved; target population; objectives; involvement of the community, the health and the non-health sectors; theoretical perspective and evaluation methods.
RESULTS: A total of 472 activities were found that met criteria, involving 300 health centres in most of the autonomous regions. Of those, 71.8% were registered in networks, and 19.3% were registered in articles. The most frequent target populations were: the general population (22.2%), youth (18.2%) and parents (10.2%). More than half (58.2%) had one or more of the following objectives: to empower the community to choose healthy behaviours; transmit health information to the population, or encourage self-care. In 33.3% of the activities there were no other sectors involved besides Primary Care. Of the remainder, non-health sectors participated in 53.8%, civic bodies in 26.9%, and government administration in 24.2%.
CONCLUSIONS: Most of the CA are documented in networks and their presence is uneven by region. The involvement of sectors other than PHC in the activities identified is low.