Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - TES (Work, Education and Health) is an open access scientific journal, edited by the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Editorial
Article
This article is the outcome of a research project carried out aiming to analyze the institutionalization of the work of community health agents in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by evaluating how a gender perspective present in these workers' qualification policy has affected how the profession is formed. A total of 167 agents took part of the study between 2011 and 2013. First, the gender perspective present in this State's policies directed to the agents is presented. The work experience of these workers in the implementation of the Family Health Program in the city and its relation to the skills seen as innate to the female condition are analyzed, followed by an investigation of how the primary care reform undertaken by the Municipal Health and Civil Defense Department in 2009 has affected the agents' work process. It was found that with the new types of management adopted, the agents have been distancing themselves from the communities they serve, thus losing the unique features that gave meaning and brought recognition to their work.
Article
The article includes theoretical and epistemological reflections on the relationship between theory and practice in professional training in health based on the mentoring experience in the technical training of community health workers. Several curricular arrangements have placed the difficulties of the association between the theory/practice and school/work world dichotomies on their agendas. A few of these arrangements proposed for training the community health agent, such as the way the concentration/dispersion mode has been configuring itself, have preserved or even strengthened the logic of training for the mere mechanical reproduction of the procedures learned over experience at work. Other arrangements, among which mentoring and professional practices, suggest it is possible to build a more organic relationship between the classroom and the labor universe. Thus, the relationship between polytechnic skills, mentoring, and professional practices is presented as a proposition to face the challenges of building the historical praxis of these workers.
Article
Based on qualitative research and on the perspective of gender theory, this study aims to identify and analyze the views health professionals working in a multidisciplinary team in oncology have of the care provided to male cancer patients. Ten health professionals that make up a multidisciplinary team at a cancer hospital in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, were interviewed. The results indicate that, to the respondents, men are a resistant, hard-to-work-with audience, requiring a different type of management than that provided to women. The biological dimension and the socialization process were singled out as factors that contribute to this gap. It was further observed that the health professionals’ discourses are also crossed by gender stereotypes. Greater emphasis was placed on women's needs and on the non-recognition of men as subjects of health and welfare action policies. It is necessary to include the masculinity topic in the oncology health service discussion agenda, favoring a participatory construction of strategies that enable the recognition of men's needs and ensure health practices guided by the principle of comprehensiveness.
Article
The decentralization of health, epidemiological, and environmental surveillance at municipalities was driven by organizational changes and changes made to federal funding, and the idea of not only integrating them, but also blending them with individual and collective care, gained momentum. Many health departments’ organization charts brought the different surveillances together under a common coordination, and managers demanded new professionals be trained to meet the needs of this arrangement. This article aims to outline the profile of the middle-level professionals at the surveillances at six municipalities in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, and services they provide, adding the views of the managers about the practices of these workers, who account for 88 percent of the surveillance workforces in these municipalities. With no specific training to carry their activities out, it was noted that the less time the manager had been holding his or her position, the poorer the employees performed. The main difficulties highlighted were political interference in the health and environmental monitoring work; poor filling in of the epidemiological investigation forms by the family health teams in the six municipalities, in addition to these professionals’ undefined roles in worker health surveillance. The required technical training is insufficient to overcome these difficulties, a fact that demands a revision of the teams’ labor management and coordination processes to ensure more effective practices.
Article
This paper aimed to develop a qualifying instrument to contribute to the monitoring and evaluation of the Multidisciplinary Residency Program in Family Health. It was an exploratory evaluation study carried out in two phases: the first comprising the face construction and validation of the logic model and of the indicator matrix, through document analysis and a nominal group consensus technique. The first phase, in turn, took place in two stages, before and after the consensus meeting, in which the goal was to validate a logical model and an indicators matrix that would reflect the main evaluative elements of the program. The second phase included the construction of the evaluation instrument. A logical model and the indicator matrix were validated based on the work done by the consensus groups, the outcome of which was 32 indicators used to build the evaluation instrument that was formatted through a structured questionnaire. This questionnaire consisted of 35 evaluative questions divided into 19 questions in the program management dimension; five in the organizational structure dimension, and 11 in the educational process dimension. The instrument that was prepared, based on a universally accepted protocol for this purpose, will need to be applied in future surveys for its validation process to be completed.
Article
The study aimed to identify the difficulties experienced by faculty in the implementation of active methodologies in the undergraduate course in nursing at a federal institution in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. This was an exploratory and descriptive survey using a qualitative approach. The semi-structured interviews were applied to twenty subjects in August and September 2011 and, subsequently, analyzed pursuant to content analysis assumptions. The main adversities listed by the research subjects were grouped into three analysis categories: Curricular issues as an impediment to the application of active teaching/learning methodologies; professor resistance to the implementation of active teaching/learning methodologies; and difficulty in understanding the applicability of active teaching/learning methodologies in the teaching practice. Faced with such difficulties, it was necessary to introduce new ways to organize and produce knowledge, since the use of active methodologies could favor the training of subjects with an enhanced view on health who are active and committed to the transformation of reality. Understanding the use of active methodologies is critical to meeting the assumptions of the contemporary educational paradigm.
Article
The article discusses the training process educator nurses get in the hospital context from the perspective of permanent education in health, highlighting the experiences that constituted this process, the meanings of the training, and the changes that took place in the development of nursing care based on meaningful learning. This was an exploratory, descriptive qualitative study developed through focus groups with seven nurses working in the Continuing Education Program in Nursing at a university hospital in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 2010, the light of the assumptions set forth under the National Policy of Permanent Education in Health. The thematic analysis of the content made using the NVivo 8.0 software for organizing and categorizing data. The results showed that the nurses' participation in the program resulted in opening to several changes in their work process and in the established teaching-learning modeling, expanding training concepts and spaces with an emphasis on collective learning at work and on it, which impacts nursing care.
Article
Continuing education in health proposes the creation of collective spaces to lead health workers to reflect on and evaluate their actions in daily life in order to seek the transformation of health and education practices. This article proposes a discussion on continuing education based on the considerations made by the Family Health Strategy workers with regard to the processes of their professional activity. A qualitative study using the focal group technique was developed for the discussion. As a result, it was found that the health professionals' reflection about the reality of their own daily work allowed for a discussion on continuing education and, thus, the onset of a process of changing their practices.
Article
Today, the family health support centers are a locus for the insertion of the physical education professional in primary health care. This fact has introduced new challenges to the work of this professional, such as the undertaking of health promotion activities at the individual and collective levels. This study aimed to analyze the actions taken by such a professional at these centers in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 2015 with 15 participants. This was a qualitative, exploratory study, which used the documentary research and focus groups as data collection instruments. The results showed different and complementary conceptions about the health promotion concept and the undertaking of comprehensive and diversified promotion actions together with the team and the community. Factors such as the reorientation of the model of health, community participation, the appreciation of multidisciplinary and intersectoral work, and government incentives for physical activity practices were identified as facilitators to carry out these actions. The greatest perceived difficulties included the lack of infrastructure and training and the conception of other professionals, still focused on individual clinical actions to the detriment of collective actions to promote health.
Article
The study aimed to identify and describe health promotion actions related to physical activity among elderly people at basic health units and the perception of those responsible for this practice. This was a cross-sectional survey using a quantitative approach carried out in Diamantina, Minas Gerais State, Brazil, in 20112. A 28-questions survey, organized in the form of a Likert scale, was used during the interviews carried out among 28 people in charge of such actions. Eleven educational health promotion actions related to physical activity among elderly people were found, five of which under the responsibility of teachers and students of a public school, while six under headed by professionals from the family health teams. The actions observed were ‘walk and exercise group (stretching),’ ‘back group,’ and ‘Qigong.’ Participants demonstrated their understanding of the benefits afforded by phy-sical activity for the elderly, the impact these actions have on public health, and the need for ongoing training.
Article
The purpose of this article is to discuss the relationship between the teaching process and the health of 196 teachers working at municipal preschools in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 2011. Methodologically, the research was developed in two stages, a quantitative and a qualitative one. In the quantitative dimension, a Job Content Questionnaire was applied to the entire faculty, the purpose of which is to investigate the occupational routines of the work that are considered a risk to the workers' health. In the qualitative dimension, data collection was carried out through semi-structured interviews on the teachers' educational practices in their daily work and about what surrounds them. The axis of the interviews addressed the daily work of these teachers and their perceptions about the importance of the early childhood education teacher. The analysis showed that the prevailing discourses reinforce the idea of teaching as a priesthood, naturalizing the idea of giving and sacrifice as intrinsic to the teaching process.
Article
The study aimed to describe the sociodemographic, labor, and training profile of aides and technicians in oral health working in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Information reported by 255 oral health aides and technicians who attended the Rio Grande do Sul Dental Congress in 2010 and 2012 was analyzed. The survey used a written, structured, and self-administered questionnaire, organized into three thematic blocks under these categories: identification (gender, age, marital status, state/city, income, license, ties and board/labor union registration), training (establishment, duration, incentive/difficulties in keeping updated/training) and work process (professional competencies and attributions). The results showed that work process differences between oral health aides and technicians, as determined by their working ties with the National Health System, were mostly in the health promotion and prevention competency attributions. It was also found that the attributions of the working environment organization and clinical care competencies in oral health provide greater identity to the work of these professionals, regardless of their ties. The study points to the overlapping of skills and duties performed by oral health aides and technicians.
Article
Working with groups is a prime strategy for health professionals, and it involves a process of subjectivity and establishment of community ties. A group of women in post-operative shoulder treatment was formed at the physiotherapy clinic of a hospital installed in the city of Curitiba, capital of the state of Paraná, Brazil, aiming to enhance the effects of conventional therapy, giving these women conditions to better cope with their pain and functional limitations. Qualitative research was carried out, which enabled the establishment of a description of the group process, as well as direct and extended contact with the subjects during six workshops held from October 2012 to March 2013. The women reported that the group was a welcoming space, where they shared life experiences, made friends, and learned from each other. This allowed them to rethink their behavior and enabled possibilities for changing attitudes. It was concluded that, given the need for humanization in care with a view to comprehensive care, using groups to support the physiotherapy process can be a strategy for a less reductionist practice that recognizes other people's needs.
Article
The low levels of compliance with drug therapy is a serious obstacle to the successful control of diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. This article addresses a study that was based on the identification of illiteracy as a major cause of non-compliance with a drug treatment among diabetic and hypertensive patients participating in the Hiperdia program at a health unit in the city of Colombo, state of Paraná, Brazil. The goal was to assess the impact of pictorial prescriptions on compliance with treatment. A group of 63 diabetic and hypertensive patients participating in Hiperdia was analyzed. They answered a structured interview, the content of which was subsequently analyzed before and after the implementation of a pictographic prescription. As a result, compliance with the drug treatment among the illiterate rose from 60 percent to 93.33 percent. There was no change in compliance in the literate group. It was concluded, however, that this type of intervention is limited to the improvement of the patients' health condition, because the increase in compliance occurs both with regard to the drug treatment and precariousness.
Ensaio
In this essay, we discuss health as an objective process, constituted of (and in) the universality of the social being. We dialoged with authors of Latin American social medicine and public health, because they pioneered this debate based on the Marxist theoretical framework. We seek to contribute to bringing the ‘ontology’ of Lukács as a theoretical framework, which is still little used in the health field. We note that the ontological approach contributes to a more accurate understanding of health as a social process and praxis (in a counter-hegemonic perspective), paving the way for understanding the current challenges of the field, as well as to have a glimpse its limits and possibilities.
Review
Review