Resumen

SUAREZ LUGO, Nery. Mercadotecnia y gestión sanitaria. Rev Cubana Salud Pública [online]. 2002, vol.28, n.2, pp.201-223. ISSN 0864-3466.

This paper sets forth that marketing constitutes a new perspective for health management and offers a higher and wider vision on the advancement so far made by different sciences and disciplines. To take possession of marketing as a management tool means to have a more extensive working tooling to take drugs, medical instrumental and technology to the market, to offer and re-orient services, to design and implement health programs, thus matching the objectives and purposes of the sanitary institution with those of the user, the consumer and the patient so that all of them can fulfill their aims. To let us follow the controversies that detractors develop is to miss the opportunity of promoting health and welfare, of striving for equity and respect to the citizen rights in order that humanity has a better place to live in, consumes what is really necessary and this has a beneficial effect on the individual and the society. To submit ourselves to the paradoxes that place us before the difficulties is to deny the possibilities offered by science to counteract them, to see the realities through a narrow and obsolete prism, to look into the past and not into the future, to let the epidemics approach us without having the adequate epidemiological thinking that allows analyzing data to rightly foresee the preventive strategy. If we take possession of marketing, we will surely find an ally to produce welfare, to give response to the new paradigms that turn out ineluctable challenges for all those who, in any part of the world, advocate for the humanity's health.

Palabras clave : ECONOMIA DE LA SALUD; MANAGEMENT; MARKETING OF HEALTH SERVICES [methods]; HEALTH ECONOMICS; HEALTH PROMOTION.