INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S HEALTH IN LATIN AMERICA: INTEGRATIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Introduction: Indigenous women often face different forms of discrimination due to gender and ethnicity, thus interfering with quality of life, morbidity and mortality rates and access to health services. Objective: To understand the health-disease process of indigenous women in South America. Method: It’s a systematic integrative review with a search in the ScieLO, PUBMED and LILACS databases using four health sciences descriptors (DeCS) in portuguese, spanish and english. The following combinations are applied “health AND indigenous AND women AND Brazil” and “health AND indigenous AND women AND NOT Brazil”. The inclusion criteria were articles in portuguese, english and spanish, which strictly addressed the relationship between health and indigenous women in Latin America in the last five years. Results: 3337 publications were identified and, after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 28 articles were selected at the end, most published in Brazil (46.43%), followed by Colombia (17.86%) and Paraguay(14, 29%). From the selected articles, 03 categories were extracted: General illnesses, Access to health services and Cultural aspects. Conclusion: Cultural, geographic, socioeconomic and linguistic barriers result in negative consequences for the health of indigenous women, such as: infections, sexually transmitted diseases, high maternal mortality rates and increased presence of chronic diseases. This way, there is a perceived negligence in the care of these women. So it is necessary to formulate public policies and reinforce existing ones, in order to combat inequality and promote equality in care, respecting interculturality.