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

The article discusses researches carried out in Portugal and in Brazil on professional knowledge respectively of social workers and health technicians, supported by the concept of sociocognition — the knowledge implied in social experience — whose analytical sense requires to identify work situations, practical and cognitive competences or modes of cognition that structure and sustain the action of workers in their situations. Such elements of professional work were organized into a typology of situational sociocognition. Professional knowledge, with a predominantly tacit character, is equivalent to the knowledge produced and mobilized in these situations. The first research carried out in Brazil, in this sense, was done with Technicians in Oral Health, after which the analysis was, in some aspects, extrapolated to the team of Family Health team technicians. Among the results, it is possible to emphasize that the main practical competence demonstrated by the studied technicians is the embracement, whereas the mode of cognition or cognitive competence that manifests the most is of an associative or selective intuitive character. Practical experience tends to be more recognized than technical training, although ethnographies of professional knowledge may help to make the relation between these two dimensions of professional work more explicit.

This is a narrative review of literature identifying different theoretical approaches that have been used in the discussion about health work. Our objective was to update the knowledge about this theme by mapping the different methodological strategies. The bibliography was organized according to three diferents perspectives of analysis: Market — the subjects of labor seen as a productive force, State — the subjects of labor understood as the link between State and Society, and Activity — the subjective dimension of work. This strategy made possible an integrated vision of the field, pointing out the different but complementary methodological paths for the analysis of work in the public health sector.

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This article analyzes the impact of the ongoing changes, with the enactment of Brazilian Federal Law no. 13415, from February 16th, 2017, in the training of youths, especially regarding the approach to health in schools. We discuss how the changes in the Law of National Education Guidelines and Foundations (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional, in Portuguese), introduced by the aforementioned law will affect education in health in school settings, reviving the debate about education in health in schools, the proposal of health as a cross-sectional topic, and the approach to health in schoolbooks. The counter-reformation of secondary education will mean, in practice, the adaptation or suppression of content that was previously mandatory with the establishment of training itineraries and syllabus arrangements with a potential to take the debate away from the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities, fields that are commonly expected to contribute to overcome the strictly biomedical conceptions and practices of the health-illness process. We consider that health professionals, teachers, researchers and students should expand this debate and effectively take part in the struggle for the reversal of the counter-reformation as it was enacted.

This essay analyzes the overmedicalization (unnecessary and unwanted medicalization) generated in the medical care to the ill in primary health care, and discusses how it happens and how to avoid it. The analysis combines three sets of conceptions/knowledge: conceptions of illness (dynamic/ontological); conceptions of causation (ascending/multidirectional); key conceptual and structuring ideas about medical knowledge (anatomopathological, physiopatological, semiological, epidemiological). Overmedicalization is due to the cognitive movements of the professionals in the development of diagnoses and therapies. It originates from the ontological conception of illness with ascending causation (causal flow that goes from the simplest material elements to more complex levels and dimensions), in combination with the overestimation of the anatomopathological key idea, which generates excessive diagnostic and pharmacotherapeutic interventions. In order to avoid overmedicalization, we propose the virtuous association of the dynamic conception of illness, with multidirectional causation and balanced used of the key conceptual ideas of the illnesses. This facilitates: a qualified listening; the contextualization of the cases; a more rigorous use of complementary exams; the recognition of the limits of the biomedical diagnoses; the overcoming of the metonymical reasoning (which disregards anything that is not scientifically-established knowledge); an expansion of the interpretation that goes beyond the 'illnesses' and treatments that go beyond drugs/surgeries, exploring the knowledge of the users and professionals and the return of the problems to autonomous supported management.

The first decade of the 21st century is particularly important for Brazilian education because it records the growth of the government policies aimed at youth and adult workers. Specifically, after the creation of the National Youth Inclusion Program (2005), the relationship between government policies and professional education becomes part of the integrative promise of hegemonic education to reduce social inequalities. In this direction, Projovem Urbano establishes, in its pedagogical practices, the initial training in an arc of occupations so that workers can respond to the demands of productive restructuring, thus reducing the unemployment crisis. Therefore, the objective of the present study consisted in apprehending the concrete reality about the initial training for work, from a categorial frame, composed by some experiences of the Projovem Urbano program. The result of the research points in the direction that the guise of the initial training has served to mask the precariousness of the professional qualification for the simple work.

This theoretical paper analyzes the centrality of the concept of risk for epidemiological science, describing the types of risk measures and their definitions, the origin and historical development of these measures from de 17th century to the present time. Next, the phases of the historical development of the concept of risk are analyzed, from the constitution of the discipline in the 19th century, through the crossing of the threshold of scientificity, until today. After this historical review, the epistemological assumptions of the concept of risk as it is presented in epidemiology are pointed out. The polysemy of the concept in common sense knowledge and its formulation in different scientific disciplines, as well as its different connotations within the scope of epidemiology, are briefly commented on. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the concept in the so-called risk society of late modernity. We believe that this paper can be useful in the formation of health professionals, in view of its core role in epidemiology and Collective Health, not only as an articulator of theoretical propositions, but also in the orientation of practices.

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