Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on indigenous women's access to healthcare in Chile.

The overarching aim of this study was to determine the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the healthcare accessibility of indigenous women in Chile compared to other demographic groups. For this, we use regression models with fixed effects at the municipality level and simulating a differences-in-differences strategy. Data for this study were sourced from the Socioeconomic Characterization Surveys (CASEN) spanning the years 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2020. The initial three-year period serves as the baseline for establishing healthcare disparities between indigenous and non-indigenous populations and between men and women in the pre-COVID era. Our findings affirm our initial hypothesis regarding the heterogeneous and concentrated effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on indigenous women's medical attention in Chile. We observed a decline of over 4.5% in the level of healthcare utilization for indigenous women during the pandemic. This exceeds the effect found for women in the aggregate by more than 3 percentage points, indicating that the impact is indeed concentrated on indigenous women. Our results encourage political decisions; access to health must consider the particularities of historically segregated groups. The needs of indigenous women in crisis contexts seem to exacerbate inequality in access to health.