Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The proposal set forth by the National Policy on Continuing Education in Health (PNEPS) is to train and develop workers for the Unified Health System (SUS). Based on this assumption, the purpose of this study was to analyze the perceptions nursing assistants have about the Continuing Education (CE) process being carried out by the Visconde de Sabóia School for Education in Family Health (EFSFVS), in Sobral, state of Ceará, Brazil. A qualitative descriptive-exploratory study was undertaken involving ten nursing assistants who participated at least once in the CE activities undertaken by the Sobral CE Coordination. Data were collected through focus group techniques, and results were analyzed from the collective subject discourse. The results showed that there were changes in the nursing assistants' practice after their insertion in the CE activities by means of the empowerment and the improvement of competencies (skills, attitudes, and knowledge). Thus, it is necessary for these workers to remain in the CE process, as well as for their systematic assessment in it in order to reach an efficient, transforming professional practice based on constant learning and aiming to qualifying health care.

Given the need for guidelines for oral health technicians (OHT) to undertake their activities, prior to Act 11889/2008, which regulated this category's professional practice, a research-action was carried out in 2008 at 12 health centers and involved 350 users, 22 OHTs, and 22 dentists. The goal was to systematize the OHTs' attributions in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was a qualitative study, based on interviews, focus groups, workshops, and participant observation. The content analysis technique was used to carefully examine the information, and the following categories were gathered based on it: practice substantiation and action standardization; professional appreciation and resistance strategies; progress made and challenges; and research-action mode. Transforming the work place into a place of learning allowed for advances such as cooperation and co-responsibility. Good supervision by the dentist has provided quality to the work done by the OHTs, even in the atraumatic restorative treatment.

In this article, we analyze pieces published by the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, in 2005, about assisted reproduction (in vitro fertilization and other techniques). The analysis is done from two angles. First, we examine what information is disclosed to the public about assisted reproduction, focusing on reproductive rights, on public and private access to assisted reproduction technologies, the interests involved, and the risks of these technologies. We found that there was no discussion regarding the laws that guarantee free access to assisted reproduction in Brazil, despite the approval, that year, of the National Policy on Sexual and Reproductive Rights. The reports emphasize the private nature of access to reproductive technologies and confront the commercial interests involved. They highlight the technological progress that has been made, such as universal benefits, but do not discuss how social inequalities affect access to these technologies and treatments. In the sparse reference to the risks associated with the procedures, they highlight multiple pregnancies which, paradoxically, affect poorer couples. Secondly, we questioned what kind of non-formal education is provided through the newspaper articles on assisted reproduction. The articles that were reviewed play both the role of disseminating the issue scientifically and the more traditional role the media play as opinion makers.

The text discusses the possibility of integrating the significant advances made in neuroscience as components of disciplinary knowledge in professor training courses. From the perspective that was adopted, this knowledge, which underlies a pedagogical knowledge, provides theoretical support for teaching, since understanding how the brain works allows for a better understanding of learning and for the consequent improvement of the didactic transposition. As a result, there is a need to revise the curricular frameworks of professor training courses, especially those involved in issuing teaching degrees, pointing, as an alternative, to the inclusion of new subjects or to the restructuring of existing ones, aiming to facilitate dialogue among neuroscience, teaching, and learning.

This reflection questions the discourse and practice surrounding the ethical education of health professionals and, more particularly, of dentists, situating the current state of deployment of the National Curriculum Guidelines in Brazilian Higher Education. The goal is to point to a few limits and possibilities for an ethical education in line with the new professional profile that is sought.

The goal is to discuss in what regard the discourse of neuroscience about the brain produces a particular notion of personhood. In particular, I investigate authors and texts that disseminate science. The idea of the 'brain as a person' is repeated in several formats in books written by renowned neuroscientists designed to reach their specialist pairs, as well as to establish and expand the number of people who become intrigued about how the brain works. I postulate, to contribute to the debate, the idea that a 'cerebralism' - a physicalist conception of person that relates the brain and the individual - is a central feature in the notion of the modern person.

With Gramsci's analysis of the transformations the human worker underwent in capitalism in the early 20th century as a starting point, this article seeks to point to aspects of how such transformation processes are taking place in capitalism in the early 21st century. To achieve this, we approach the transition from muscular and energetic problem of substituting human for machine labor to the cognitive and informational issue of control in the man-machine couplings. From Taylor's tamed gorilla to Nicolelis' monkey, the forms of subsumption of the worker to capital changed, but not the actual subsumption.

This essay discusses the notion of subjectivity under which the neurosciences operate, but also points to what has been the main topic and goal of this subject in the 21t century: the idea that thinking broadly and subjective experiences can be understood and explained by the activity of our neurons. The mainstream version of the studies on the brain part from the premise - which they do not argue - that thought derives from the cerebral functions and is basically determined by it. If I think as I do, if I feel what I feel, if I do what I do, in sum, if I am as I am, it is because my brain is how it is. Thus, I find myself condensed and trapped in this organ, turned into a pilot of myself. We investigate this issue, highlighting the statistics on psychotropic drug use, the history of the connection between the brain and thought and, finally, the research programs in neuroscience.

This essay pinpoints four key issues that are central to the epistemology of cognition-oriented neurosciences: the multiple levels of analysis in the study of the brain functions, the confrontation between the computational and dynamicist models; the proper treatment of the interactions among the brain, the body, and the environment; and the philosophical problems encountered in the attempts made to build a neurobiological theory of conscious and human language processes.