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

The aim of the present study was to analyze the relationships between work, education and health in the strike of the education professionals of the Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) municipal network, in the year of 2013. This is a qualitative research, which adopted individual interviews and documentary research as its investigation technique, based on the trade union press. We chose the thematic analysis technique, and three main themes of interpretation were identified: work and defense of quality public education; collective learning and struggle pedagogy; and collective fight for health. From the angle of the historical understan-ding of the event, the strike materialized as a space for questioning the situation of work in schools and as a movement of struggle in defense of quality public education. Likewise, the strike raised reflections about the relationship between teaching as an occupation and the struggle for health. The conclusion is that the collective actions of workers are spaces of learning, of production of knowledge, and of intervention in health. It is an extended perspective of education and health, as a pedagogical praxis, which is carried out in the struggle and in the valorization of the collective experience of work.

In the present essay, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of his manuscript, we revisit the classic book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. Amidst difficult times for Brazil, and at a time in which we see the rise of the Non-Partisan School Movement (Movimento Escola sem Partido, in Portuguese), among other ‘advancements’ of conservatism, the masterpiece of the patron of Brazilian education is more current and vigorous than ever before. Here, even though we recognize that Freire's essay meant a certain ‘revolution’ in pedagogy, our focus is on what we consider his central, though little debated, thesis: the pedagogy of revolution. Moreover, in the end, we show that Freire was one of the pioneers in Brazil of the post-colonial thinking, and this must work as a point of convergence with this libertarian school of thought, whose revival renews the hopes and utopia of the Left.

The study has the goal of discussing what is a concept based on the adoption of the Marxist theoretical framework to define it, with the intent of answering whether the existence of a concept of health is possible or not. We read Marxist authors who deal with the relationship between thought and objective reality, trying to rely on many different authors within this framework, in order to enrichen the current debate in Collective Health. As a result, we understand that that the concept is the way in which thought apprehends the objects that are present in objective reality and that, precisely because it does not contain the concrete-factual features that are present in each particular case, it enables us to understand them based on their abstract-universal objects. Therefore, we conclude that, even though health is an extremely complex object, the existence of its concept is possible, and, according to our frameworks, this concept must refer to the socio-historic whole and to the politicization of the technical dimension that is historically implicated with this social.

*

The study had the goal of assessing the organization of the work process of family health teams in a municipality in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It was a quantitative, cross-sectional analytical research performed in 2014. We investigated the forms for the Self-Assessment for the Improvement in the Access and Quality of Primary Health Care of 73 teams. A total of 14 items of the subdimension organization of the work process were considered, and they were scored from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning complete inadequacy and 10 meaning complete adequacy of the team to the assessed pattern. The teams were classified from the ‘highly unsatisfactory’ pattern to the ‘highly satisfactory’ pattern. The significance level of the statistical analyses was set as values of p < 0.05. A total of 86.3% were classified in the highly satisfactory/satisfactory pattern, and 13.7% were classified as average/highly unsatisfactory. Three items ‒ ‘Defined territory, bond with the population and responsibility for the fulfilment of the health needs’; ‘Coordination of care’; and ‘Monitoring of exam requests’ ‒ had inadequate performances. The teams from urban areas scored better in the assessment. The odontology professionals were the category that scored the highest in the assessment. Special attention should be devoted to the teams with low scores. A better organization of the work process should be strengthened, with the goal of enhancing the performance in the care to health of the community.

The increase in the implementation of the Family Health and Primary Health Care Expanded Support Center in the state of Paraíba, Brazil, and its influence on the improvement in the quality of the assistance of the primary health care teams makes it relevant to get to know the organization of the work process within these centers. The study analyzed the planning actions, the offer of initial training and ongoing education, and the integration with the supported teams. Methodologically, it is a descriptive, quantitative and cross-sectional study. The data was obtained from module IV of the 2nd cycle of external evaluation of the Program for the Improvement of the Access to and Quality of Primary Health Care (Programa de Melhoria do Acesso e da Qualidade da Atenção Básica, in Portuguese). The corochromatic map was developed using the TabWin software, and the descriptive analysis was made using the IBM SPSS Statistics software, version 20.0. Regarding the offer of initial training and ongoing education for the Center, we observed that the teams that underwent the former (50%) were more likely to be offered the latter (74.1%), and the courses were offered in larger municipalities. The initial training had as its most common activities the qualification/informational meeting workshops (20.7%) and the introductory course (20.7%). There is a weakness in the records and in the execution of the systematized planning, mainly regarding the monitoring and assessment of the actions. The integration between the Family Health Support Center teams and the reference teams is weak and not in line with the conceptual goals of the matrix support.

The increasing complexity of health needs that require expanded and contextualized approach and the organization of networked services has motivated revisiting the concept of teamwork, the team-integration and grouping typology and its attributes. Effective teamwork is an expression, on the one hand, of the articulation of the actions of the various areas from the recognition of their interdependence and, on the other, of the indispensable complementarity between instrumental and communicative action. It is noteworthy that teamwork is also an expression of the social division of labor and the transmutation of technical differences into unequal social value of specialized work of different professions and, therefore, of their agents. The contradictions present in work processes, in their substantiation with health needs, may be limited to reiterating the dominant models of health care or seeking to overcome them through reflective and dialogical mediations of team workers among themselves and with users, families and population. Finally, teamwork is one of the forms of interprofessional work together with interprofessional collaboration and collaborative practice, and this collaboration can take place in the team or in networking with users and the community.

The present study had the goal of investigating the work experience of community health workers with individuals who live with HIV/Aids in areas of social risk. It is a qualitative research performed in 2015 with community health workers of medium-sized municipalities in the state of Paulo, Brazil. The narratives were produced using the focus group method, and they were interpreted and analyzed through the thematic analysis of content. Prejudice was the main cause of difficulties in the work of these professionals; however, the establishment of bonds with the users, coupled with the fact that the workers gained their trust, was the main potentiality in the actions of those professionals. Therefore, it is essential that we break the barrier generated by prejudice in order to guarantee and effective work in the territories on the part of the community health workers, so they can contribute to the embracement of these users and to the reduction in the effects of the existing vulnerability.

The present article has the goal of describing and analyzing the general social conditions regarding race/ethnicity, gender, social class and schooling among a sample of 500 subjects (n = 250 men; n = 250 women), aged 60 years or older, who are users of the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS, in the Portuguese acronym) and live in the rural area of a medium-sized municipality in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, between 2015 and 2016. The design of the study is of a mixed nature, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques in order to describe and analyze the selected categories intersectionally. The data was collected using a structured questionnaire with closed questions regarding sociodemographic aspects. With the aid of the software IBM-SPSS (version 20.0), we produced a databank with descriptive and specific information. The obtained results confirm inequalities regarding gender and race/ethnicity, and the women who self-reported as being black are more vulnerable in terms of finances and schooling than the women who self-reported as being white and the men who self-reported as being white or black in the same age group. Lastly, the data enable us to counter the thesis that the 1988 Constitution and its adjacent policies would have provoked an interruption in the inequalities in generational terms.