Does Community Participation Work? : A Study on the Impact of Health Care Reform in Chile

Community participation in health has been praised as a new way of improving health inequality in developing countries for many decades. This paper is an attempt to evaluate community participation programs in health focusing on two intercultural health hospitals in IX Region of Chile. After exploring the process of program building and its impact on the quality of service, this paper concludes that a community participation program with stronger participation resulted in higher patient satisfaction. The author expects such finding to contribute to more comprehensive understanding of the impact of participation in health programs.