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

This study aimed to understand the relationship between oral health technicians and dental surgeons in work and the factors that may promote or hinder this relationship. To analyze the perception oral health technicians have regarding possible agreements and disagreements in their working relationship with dental surgeons, a focus group was held with eight of those workers from the National Health System working at the municipalities encompassed by the Vitória metro region, in Espírito Santo, Brazil. The thematic content analysis revealed three categories: Profile and labor market; Working and infrastructure conditions, and Vocational training, work processes, and interpersonal relationships. The complexity of the work was shown, within the field of interests, power and resistance, involving both the technicians and dental surgeons, in a behavior generator matrix. These workers' training system, the infrastructure, working conditions, and the professionals' profile also influence the oral health team's work process heavily. Communication was seen as a mediator in this, building new encounters. It is considered that there are many barriers to the relationship between oral health care technicians and dental surgeons at work, and mediation is seen to be possible through communication, building new meeting grounds, and representing alternatives to the desecration of what has been instituted, overcoming the challenges in the power relations.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the transformations that have taken place in work, the demands of training, and new skills in the primary health policy, with particular emphasis on the impacts on the work of physicians in the family health units in Portugal. The qualitative survey was carried out by querying documentary sources: Decrees, laws, action plans, and reports on the policies and organizational structure in health facilities, adopting content analysis to process data. It recommends that the commitment to the renewal process entails new instituting movements, which empower the (re)construction of the medical identity, understood not only as individuation/identification, rather constituted as an ongoing process linked to personal identity, enabling the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of something that gives meaning to the work done. For work in health, we value a new professional profile provided with highly qualified, integrating, inseparably, theory, technical, practical, and social knowledge. ‘Service provision’ and ‘health care’ have a subjective and individual dimension; however, at the same time they are expressed in groups and populations, and are guided by cultural values and clinical standards recognized by science.

The discussions on the public-private relationship highlight the need to provide public management with more managerial and administrative autonomy, agility and flexibility in strategic sectors of the health care system. The qualitative research that was the origin of the present article had the aim of analyzing the work management at the State-Owned Family Health Foundation of Bahia (Fundação Estatal de Saúde da Família da Bahia, in Portuguese) and at the State Health Foundation of Sergipe (Fundação Estadual de Saúde de Sergipe, in Portuguese), using the technique of data triangulation and hermeneutic-dialectical analysis. Managers, workers and users from both states took part in the study, totaling twenty semi-structured interviews. The contextual factors and the actors were analyzed using a model that emphasized the dimensions of the macro- and microcontexts. The satisfactory performance regarding work management may be attributed to the variety and complexity of the factors faced by the direct administration. The interrelationship of the microcontext with subdimensions of the macrocontext contributed favorably to the implementation of the foundations. As contributions to the managers, we developed a table containing indicators for the monitoring of the attributions of the work management at the state-owned foundations. The results and potentialities of these experiences may help face the challenges to management in health, providing it with more efficacy, speed and solvability in health care and work management in the Brazilian Unified Health System.

Research shows that, today, spirituality is an important aspect of human life. The achievements made by the biomechanical model of teaching and practice of medicine were unable to overshadow the role that spirituality plays in the health-disease process. Following a trend occurring in medical schools throughout the world, the authors introduced at the Federal University of São Paulo the optional Spirituality and Medicine class, aimed at medical and nursing students and to promote the recognition of the spiritual dimension of the patient and, thus, afford more humane care. After four years of the course being offered, a qualitative study was carried out to determine the profile of the students who chose to take the class, their perception concerning the spirituality and health topic, and the importance attributed to the course when it comes to their personal, professional, and humanistic development. The texts produced by the students during the course were the main source of data. The data were interpreted through a hermeneutic phenomenology focus and highlighted the following issues: The search for the meaning of life; independence of views about God and spirituality and the importance given to the discipline; Spirituality and humanization, and spirituality, self-care and self-knowledge.

Stress at work affects psychological, physical and social aspects of the workers, as well as the efficacy of the productive organizations. The goal of the present study was to comprehend occupational stress in the journalistic media under the perspective of the organization of labor. It is a qualitative research conducted through Bardin’s content analysis, based on the analytical categories previously defined by the World Health Organization in the ‘Work Organization & Stress’ report, under the perspective of the theoretical framework of Christophe Dejours. We classified 727 news stories that had ‘stress’ as a keyword, with 130 news stories specifically approaching the topic of stress at work. The news stories were divided into two categories, each with subcategories of their own: ‘Content of the Risks of Stress’ (47) and ‘Context of the Risks of Stress’ (59). We verified that the media has scarcely been working as the spokesperson for the workers in order to fulfill its social role, without stimulating them as social subjects. We propose that the news media stimulates actions that boost the prominence of the workers, based on the visibility of the current laws, and indicates more direct ways for the workers to be able to fight to guarantee their rights to health in the struggle against stress, with a critical perspective of the understanding regarding the organization of labor and its potentialities in the promotion of health.

The current discussion on education and health has shown the need for greater integration between health services and the academy. The National Policy of Permanent Health Education proposed the dissemination of pedagogical capacity in the National Health System, so that the public health system would become a teaching and learning space while one performs his or her work. The goal was to get to know the process of integration between education and health services in Primary Health Care, from the actions of professors in the training process of students in the undergraduate courses in health care at the Federal University Rio Grande do Norte. Semi-structured interviews and direct observation were the techniques chosen, and data analysis, based on the hermeneutic-dialectic approach, showed that the professor's performance is an important strategy to facilitate integration between teaching and service. The conclusion points to the realization that the professionals involved in teaching are educated while they educate, and that the educational process is permeated by heterogeneous knowledge and experience, a highly favorable factor for the training of students and professionals.

This article presents and discusses the results of research that discusses the potentiality of the praxis and public/collective health involving professionals and knowledge in the construction of knowledge in health in the school environment. The study was conducted during the 2012 school year in a public school in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with the participation of teachers, high school students, and undergraduate interns. The research action methodology involves collective action guided based on the resolution of problems identified from a diagnosis of the situation prepared by the participants. The diagnosis was made through questions made to the teachers and trainees, and an essay directed to students. The results obtained from teachers reveal that public health is understood as a duty of the State in the provision of prevention and health care services. Collective health, meanwhile, is associated with the population's physical, mental, and social well-being. Both professors and trainees, who have participated in interdisciplinary projects, recognize the experience as positive. Students recognized that education is prioritized in relation to the school's physical and sanitary conditions, but identified in such conditions risk factors for learning and, consequently, health and quality of life.

This paper aims to analyze the implementation of black people health in the undergraduate courses of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine at a public Brazilian university. The theoretical foundation consists of a qualitative intervention-research study, based on Black Feminist Epistemology and Black Perspective of Decoloniality. Two workshops were held with the members of the Structural Teaching Nuclei of those courses in 2019 and 2020. Despite the guidelines of the legal framework on the teaching of ethnicracial relations, it was possible to observe the incipience of training, the absence of black professors in these spaces and the presence of a faculty’s whiteness that perpetuates privileges. From the results and discussion presented, it appears that it is through emancipatory movements and thoughts in the political, cultural, pedagogical and epistemological fields that it is possible to intend ruptures in power relations and in the structures of the State.