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

This paper aims to describe and to analyze the foundation of Forums of the services composing the Network for Psychosocial Care in the territory of a Management District of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It is a qualitative study performed with intervention-research from March 2014 to March 2015. To analyze this process, we used field diary as a tool to record the Forums and assessment reports of trainings seminars in mental health, performed with primary healthcare professionals. The Forum arrangement, with professionals of several services, defines a process that aims to join different points in the Network for Psychosocial Care, promoting interlocution among the services and co-responsibility for management-execution of the territory healthcare. From the relations emerged in the Forums, we propose to rethink work processes, questioning the practices and knowledges in health, alluding to Permanent Education in Health as an important strategy in this setting. As initial results, we think the monthly meetings provided reflection spaces and proposed construction of flows and connections among work, management, and Permanent Education, aspects considered inseparable in the public health filed.

This study had the aim of understanding the dynamics of the process of institutionalization of the only Family Health Support Center set up in the city of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Even though the city is a pioneer in the practice of matrix support, in it, the establishment of the Center happens at a very slow pace, and it is relevant to identify the factors related to the inexpressive presence of this organizational arrangement, as well as to analyze its practices. We chose to make a single-case research, and, in order to produce the empirical material, we used participant observation and focal groups. The data were grouped in two axes: the ‘made history’, which focus on the context of the municipal health policies; and ‘history in the making’, which refers to the comprehension of the perceptions of the participants of that history. We observed that the experience of the studied Family Health Support Center presents potentialities and tensions. The matrix support methodology is the basis of the practice of the team, and favors the bond with primary health care, the development of an interactive interprofessional relationship, guided by the exchange of knowledge and the strengthening of the work in network. However, the difficulties in the expansion of these centers as an imperative organizational arrangement point to the permanence of the tensions regarding the history of the conformation of the matrix practices, which are based on independent teams and are organized by topics.

The career path plays a significant role in the lives of people nowadays. Based on this premise, we sought to understand the meaning of community in the work context of a multiprofessional hospital team. The qualitative research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with eight professionals of the outpatient hematology and pediatric oncology services at a public hospital in the Southern region of Brazil, from April to June 2015. The interviews were analysed using Discursive Practices. We established four categories, which originated from the theoretical components of the meaning of community. The results indicate that the elements of belonging; influence; integration and satisfaction of needs; and shared emotional bonds were present in the discourses of the team. There was a proximity among the narratives of the participants and the concept of community in order to characterize the contexts of the work and of the relationships developed. However, we also noticed signs of hierarchical tensions in the relationships, the validation of individualist practices, non-externalized conflicts, and the difficulty to deal with differences. We concluded that there is a need for higher investments in the validation and integration of the different professionals implicated in the process of promotion of health and of the meaning of community among Brazilian teams.

The aim of this study was to systematize the configurations of Family Health Support Centers. A qualitative study was conducted in three municipalities of metropolitan Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, and considered data collected from focus groups in three Family Health Support Centers and analyzed through the meaning condensation technique. The study’s findings allowed the systematizing of three types of configurations: the assistive-curative, which shows great distancing from the family health support center’s goals; the semi-matrical, considered to be an intermediary configuration, and the matrical, which stays closer to the ideal model, recommended by the Ministry of Health. In conclusion, there is, on all three municipalities, a recent and fragile family health proposal that, despite its potentialities, is permeated with conflicts, contestations and uncertainties. The findings of the present study can assist in the planning and execution of actions that seek to break from various hegemonic concepts regarding the work of primary healthcare professionals.

The damages resulting from alcohol abuse gained prominence in the eighteenth century, with the rise of capitalism. Sanitary and governmental control measures followed the sociohistorical construction. In Brazil, the Alcohol and Drug Policy of the Ministry of Health, implemented in the first decade of the twenty-first century, proposed network care actions, including primary health care services. In spite of the efforts to train the professionals, the actions in health are little welcoming, stigmatizing and inefficient due to the complexity of the topic. With the aim of getting to know and analyzing the beliefs and health practices in the care offered to alcohol users in primary health care, we conducted this qualitative research with the health professionals of a primary health care service using semi-structured interviews and content analysis. The theoretical references related to collective health and social sciences support this analysis. The results pointed to moralizing and bigoted attitudes, with a practice that criminalizes alcohol use, mainly among lower-income classes, guided by normalized conducts, with a focus on the removal of risk and on complete abstinence, according to the hegemonic biomedical model, and distant from the needs of the subjects and the complexity that surrounds the issue.

The article presents an analysis about the importance of militancy in the construction of a regional public policy of permanent education. Taking as a reference the political action of participants of the Commission for Integration Teaching-Service, in Region 28 of Health, in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, the analysis gives attention to the political space that Comission participants occupy not only in the political, but also in the execution of actions relatedto permanent health education in the region. From the methodological point of view, the research was based on two main procedures: survey and analysis of secondary data, which covered legislation related to the policy of permanent education in health and the structuring of Commission for Integration TeachingService; semi-structured interviews with Commission for Integration Teaching-Service participants from Region 28 of Health of Rio Grande do Sul. As a result, it was verified that, although the Commission for Integration Teaching-Service was established by legislation with only advisory functions within the health regions, the committed performance of its participants in Region 28 of Health of Rio Grande do Sul is able to transform it into an important space (regional) of militancy and execution of policies of permanent education in health.

The aim was to investigate health literacy and association with social and demographic factors, self-perception of health and quality of life in adults. This is a cross-sectional study with adults between 20 and 59 years, users of primary health care, conducted in the basic health units, from February to May of 2015 – probability sample. Health literacy was evaluated by means of Short Assessment of Health Literacy for Portuguese-speaking Adults. Descriptive statistical analysis, bivariate analysis (p ≤ 0.20) and multiple logistic regression (p ≤ 0.05) were performed. Inadequate health literacy was recurrent and initially associated with sex, schooling, last grade concluded with approval, minimum formal study, Brasil Economic Classification Criterion, health insurance, family arrangement, importance attributed to health, grade attributed to own health, attendance to the basic health unit and two domains of the test World Health Organization Quality of Life (social relations and environmental). In the final model of logistic regression, only schooling remained associated with health literacy, in a way that individuals with less schooling had more chance of having inadequate health literacy. The findings suggest the need to develop health education strategies for adult users of primary care.

This article aims to understand the meaning of the work for the higher education teacher in public and private institutions in their various regimes of workflexibility based on the identification of instrumental and subjective rationality elements. The collection of data had multiple sources, such as the documentary analysis of institutions and teachers’ work contracts, direct observation and personal interviews. As a result it was noticed that: there is a preponderance of the substantive meaning of the work on the instrumental sense; the flexibilization alters the perception of individual performance and infers on its substantive sense, and life is arranged from the organization of work flexibilized.

This article aims to identify and analyze the concepts of health present in teachers’ demands at the National Confederation of Education Workers, inBrazil. It is the result of a documental research carried out on the resolutions of congresses held by the labor union in the period from 1999 to 2014. Using content analysis of documents, references to health were classified in demands either of economic-corporative or ethical-political nature. The results of the documental investigation indicate that, besides a strict concept of health marked by corporative demands, there is also a broad concept of health. The demand for health under the perspective of a social right guaranteed through public policies may be a fertile pathway for the defense of health in its ontological sense, rather than as an economic factor understood as merchandise and sufficient to reproduce the workforce.

The aim of this study is to discuss the contributions of the theatre of the oppressed in health promotion and to collaborate with the improvementof the consolidation of this dialogue in practice experiences. Comparing the main perspectives of health promotion, there is a mismatch between the ethical, aesthetic and political foundations of the theatre of the oppressed and the theoretical assumptions of the behaviorist health promotion, because this kind of theatre pulls away from any attempt at domestication of bodies and norms of behavior, habits and lifestyles to reach healthy standards. There are greater consonance between the theatre of the oppressed and the new health promotion, its politicization and its searches to approach scientific and technical knowledge with popular knowledge, since both seek the fortification of humane practice that put in question the status quo and the social change towards a libertarian and critical transformation.