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

Based on the hot-button discussion about humane health care, this essay aims to discuss the approach to the necessary contribution of the theory of culture and taste education. Upon bringing up, from a historical and philosophical perspective, Goethe's concepts of Kultur and Bildung and the understanding that training is a result of taste education, we seek to think of the humanization of health professionals beyond the implementation of technical training policies applied in daily work as an effective personal training experience that goes through a cultural experience.

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This study discusses how the professionals on the family health team interpret and represent the health education and educational practice they perform. The subjects (n=248) - physicians, nurses, nurse aides, and community health workers from 20 basic health units in Belo Horizonte (southeastern Brazil) - were interviewed using the free recall technique and the theory of social representations. Subjects were asked to verbalize five words that came to their minds immediately when thinking about health education, rating them as positive or negative. The Evoc software was used and the simple frequency of occurrence, the weighted average of occurrence based on the order of recall, and the weighted average of all the terms mentioned were calculated. The four decimal frame comprising the central core and contrast and peripheral elements of representation was constructed. Physicians and nurses shared representational content among themselves, expressing similar social representations when presenting the possible central core of 'empowerment' and 'prevention.' Nursing aides and community health workers resemble each other through the possible central elements of 'education' and 'prevention.' The focus is on the conveyance of guidelines aimed at persuading individuals to adopt healthy lifestyles.

The study aimed to understand the perception Dentistry students at the Federal University of Paraíba have of the use of portfolios as one of the evaluation methods. Data were collected from 16 students in 2011 by means of the focus group technique and were analyzed based on content analysis. The themes were then defined: conceptualization, student-professor role, active methods, difficulties in preparing portfolios and suggestions. Students see portfolios as an instrument of dialog between professors and students through accounts of group experiences in the social equipment and individual reflections in the construction of concepts and theoretical deepening. It was concluded that students perceive the portfolio as a powerful, innovative tool for vocational training, serving to monitor the teaching--learning process for being dialogical, interactive,and providing opportunities for active learning.

This essay discusses the new scenarios for the training of health professionals for the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS, Unified Health System) and how they are related the proposals made in the report entitled "Health Professionals for a New Century: Transforming Education to Strengthen Health Systems in an Interdependent World". It was drafted by an independent committee made up of 18 professionals and academics from several countries, led by physicians and professors Julio Frenk and Lincoln Chen and created in January 2010, in the United States, by the health sector to honor the centennial of the Flexner Report. The purpose of the report was to lay down recommendations for the adoption of educational and institutional innovations aimed at training a new generation of professionals in order for them to be best equipped to deal with the area's present and future challenges in a comprehensive perspective of health promotion. The discussion resulted in the perception that, despite governmental policies and programs created in Brazil since 2001 and of timely institutional initiatives, health area professionals still get training that is strongly guided by a hospital-centric educational conception, categorizes illnesses based on biological criteria, and dissociates clinic practice and politics, something that is not suitable to help strengthen the SUS.

In several countries, and in Brazil in particular, the adoption of primary care as a factor to reorder health systems has been consolidated by highlighting the community worker, who is called a community health agent in the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS, Unified Health System). Understanding that this fact has ancient roots, this paper, with a historical perspective, is developed based on a review of documents and literature, guided by the mapping of projects put into dispute. In the analysis, tensions that permeated the configuration of healthcare proposals with these characteristics were distinguished: continuous action and linkage to the territory; health education as a relevant strategy, and the connection between health services and local populations, mediated by a worker who has this role as his or her primary social role. Also analyzed were features that constitute the work of the community health worker in the SUS, which represent challenges to the qualifications of these workers, having the rights associated with the work, and the complexity of the healthcare work and its technical and political role as a parameter.

Official documents intended to reorient the training provided to health professionals in Brazil were used as a source to a survey conducted to determine what such documents report as innovative educational principles. This survey aimed to clarify the connection between these principles and a certain educational line, problematizing the theoretical and methodological origins of the current framework for vocational education at the undergraduate level in the area. The reorientation of health training is expressed in different official initiatives: the National Curriculum Guidelines for undergraduate courses, the National Policy for Continuing Education in the Health, and in the Pro-Health program. The educational principles widely cited in the documents were analyzed: meaningful learning, the facilitator teacher, learning to learn, and active methodologies. Based on the study of the Brazilian theoretical production on the theoretical and practical educational lines, we compared the educational principles from those documents. In conclusion, the educational principles presented are connected to theoretical and methodological benchmarks ofnon-directive pedagogies, which, when contextualized, are inserted, temporally, into in the early years of the twentieth century, focusing on the proposals for child education.

This study assesses how popular organizations discuss public health policies based on the analysis of popular participation and on the construction of citizenship in the city of Florianópolis, southern Brazil. It was carried out with social control institutions and organizations. The methodological strategy used was qualitative surveys, with the collective subject discourse as technical analysis. The discourses show that the subjects have an understanding of health with elements that refer to a biological concept, but also advance to an expanded concept. It was observed that citizenship is not limited merely to ensuring rights; rather it extends to the struggle to achieve it. In this sense, participation emerges as a duty to be exercised collectively.