Banca de DEFESA: CAROLINE MEDEIROS RODRIGUES E SILVA

URBAN NETWORKS AND HEALTH: AN ANALYSIS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF THE CAICÓ-RN HOSPITAL NETWORK AND THE INFLUENCE EXERCISED IN ITS IMMEDIATE REGION

Key words: Urban networks; Health policies; Northeast semiarid; Medium Cities; Caicó - RN

This text reflects about how knowledge of urban networks, resulting from the relationships established from the production, circulation and consumption of goods and services between urban centers with different levels of centrality and position in the urban hierarchy, are an important tool for the identification of particularities of the urban dynamics of different parts of the territory, being an important field of research in Brazil, influencing even the development of important public policies, such as health policies (FEITOSA, 2018). The analysis of urban networks makes it possible to understand the rebuttal of the contradictions of the capitalist system on the geographic space, in which the territorial division of labor (CORRÊA, 1994) implies the development of a relationship of dependence of urban centers with less centrality to those ones of greater centrality, which, in turn, is an important characteristic of the relationships established by the urban environment of the semi-arid Northeast (ALVES, 2017), whose understanding of urban reality also requires an interpretation of the average city that goes beyond quantitative concepts (SPOSITO , 2010). With that, taking the city of Caicó as one of the main urban centers in Rio Grande do Norte, it is questioned how the hospital health flows directed to hospitals located in the aforementioned city interfere in the local urban network of the Immediate Geographic Region of Caicó, strengthening the municipality as a regional pole in the state.