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 study aimed to evaluate the perception graduates have of the current pedagogical project in place at the College of Dentistry at the Ponta Grossa State University State of Paraná, southern Brazil. A total of 91 students took part in the study by completing a selfadministered questionnaire. Most students were knowledgeable about the course's pedagogical project, had a positive view of it, and considered that it includes the features of the National Curriculum Guidelines. The skills and abilities, expressed in the Guidelines and provided by the course, those in which the students consider themselves as more apt to play a role are prevention, promotion, protection and rehabilitation; willingness to continuous learning, and decision-making and performance in multidisciplinary teams. As for the curricular structure, most students noted content duplication across disciplines and difficulties in providing comprehensive care to patients. However, most rated integration between theory and practice as optimal or satisfactory. The results of this study, together with the institutional assessment, show that, despite the positive perception of the academic community, there are some weaknesses in the course's current pedagogical project, pointing to the need for progress in the construction of an integrated curriculum.
Article
This article is an attempt to analyze the widespread use of the term 'quality of life' in everyday language and techniques in contemporary Western societies. The broad use of this term is accompanied by an uncertainty with regard to its meaning and a naturalized conception of its origin. The goal, therefore, is to analyze the processes by which the term quality of life was imbued with meaning in our culture and to argue that the major symbolic meaning acquired contemporaneously by quality of life in the biomedical sciences, health policies, and practices relating to individual health is related to a broader process of integrating biological aspects of life in the political field. Thus, I briefly introduce the emergence and development of biopolitics in modernity, and analyze some of the characteristics of contemporary biopolitics based on how the concepts of lifestyle, promotion of health, risk, autonomy and responsibility are presented which, together, constitute the current semantic field in which health is problematized. Therefore, I seek to situate the current concern for quality of life, as well as to present some of the issues that are linked to it, such as individual responsibility for one's own health and the measure of quality of life.
Article
This is an exploratory descriptive study based on a qualitative approach which purpose was to understand how health service coordinators involved in providing care to individuals in psychological distress perceive the organization of the mental health care network in Santa Maria, state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and vignettes in the months of April and May 2008. Ten health service coordinators participated in the study. The data were processed through thematic analyses and, subsequently, grouped into three clusters of meaning: The understanding of care flows, network operation, and of the difficulties and potential envisioned. The results showed a network under construction, highlighting the existence of movements aimed at improving coordination between the services and the resulting quality of care provided to the users of the mental health care network. The authors propose a reinforcement of the relations between the services, heightening the relationship between primary care, substitutive services, and hospital care. Emphasis is put on the role played by management in the process, considering the need for the involvement of different sectors in order to attain a more qualified mental health care service.
Article
This article aims to analyze the students' expectations with regard to the vocational training courses provided under the "Projovem Trabalhador" occupational health arch, in Rio de Janeiro, the educational concepts and strategies used in the courses, and the changes that took place in their social situation in the educational, economic, psychosocial and socio-political dimensions. This is a qualitative study that used focus groups and interviews with 58 students of the courses. In the educational dimension, vocational skills received were insufficient and did not prepare students to face the challenges of the labor market. Most continue pursuing courses in order to increase their chances of employment. In the economic dimension, most of the young people remained unemployed, while in psychosocial dimension there was reference to the issues of subjectivity, self-esteem, and improved communications and sociability. Insofar as the socio-political dimension is concerned, the students' biggest gain was in understanding their rights as citizens, but this did not lead them to act in the spaces of society, such as trade unions and social movements. It is concluded that the students' perceptions and the meanings that they attribute to the Program reflect the contradictions of the policy, indicating that young people are not mere passive recipients, rather subjects of rights and protagonists that demand an education that meets their interests.
Article
This study examines the theoretical and epistemological benchmarks of education contained in the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) for the training of health professionals in Brazil. To achieve its goals, it rescues the historicity of the relationship among education, health, and society and the reform of medical education; it describes the movement of instituting the DCN for the health care area in Brazil, and discusses the relationship between the benchmark of the pedagogy of skills that underpins the DCN and the concept of the right to health formulated by the 8th National Health Conference. The results of this investigation suggest the hypothesis that, to train health professionals committed to the principles of the 8th National Health Conference and with the understanding of health as a right, it is necessary to question the limits of the pedagogy of skills adopted by the DCN as well as to build a proposal for training that converses with the assumption of social transformation, so that its didactics enables students to evolve critically from the individual and common praxis to the historical one.
Article
The Education Through Work for Health Program (PET-Saúde) aims to qualify the workforce for the Brazilian Unified Health System. This study was carried out to evaluate the contribution made by three PET-Saúde experiments in medical training. Based on historical and dialectical materialism, we sought to understand the integration of PET-Saúde in medical education as a social phenomenon subordinate to the historical conditions of economic production. Data were collected from reports made by students, tutors, mentors and coordinators of three groups of PET-Saúde at two universities in Curitiba, southern Brazil, through interviews and focus groups. It was concluded that, in two groups, the experiences contributed to training flexible workers, effective in the application of technology to solve issues within the limits imposed by the current order. In the third group, the experience contributed to training critical subjects, able to question the limits imposed by the State and society to the full realization of life.
Article
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a popular health education program directed to community seniors with regard to their attitudes toward aging. The program was based on the Paulo Freire methodology and on World Health Organization's active aging policy. It consisted of 16 weekly 150minute sessions offered to two groups of elderly (n=16) aged 60 to 75 years (M=66.88±5.4). Pre-testing, post-testing and follow-up were carried out to measure matters related sociodemographic, health, and lifestyle issues, as well as attitudes toward aging. Content analysis showed a statistically significant decrease in the frequency of negative attitudes, increased positive ones, and an improved perception that aging involves both gains as losses. The results suggest that such interventions can drive the quality of life of seniors by engendering a more positive view of old age itself. The program that was undertaken has also contributed to the daily lives of professionals working in the area of education and health.
Review
Review
Ensaio
This essay aims at examining the sexual division of labor around the dissociation of productive work from the family reproduction space that took place during the installation and development of capitalism in Brazil, particularly based on reflections on the historical context between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. This shows our intent to decharacterize analyses of the naturalistic ideology that legitimizes the principles of separation of the work of men and that of women. Therefore, we try to explain this dissociation based on changes that have taken place in the family as a productive base, as well as the relationship between production and reproduction in the rural unit (traditional). We will try to report how some of the changes took place in traditional family practices, by separating productive activities from everyday life at home. This confirmed the genesis of the urbanindustrial society, in the face of consonance between traditional units and modern production units.
Experience Report
This paper aimed to present teaching experiences that used the care training brief as a research-training methodology in preparing course completion papers in the College of Nursing. This teaching approach is intended to cause the students to reflect on their own training process in order to become aware of events, strategies and spaces that, to them, throughout their lives, contributed to their training. In this regard, the process of building the brief favors readings regarding care to be brought up again, enabling students to narrate their training experiences, in a significant manner, in the course of their education. Reflecting on the learning made while preparing the training brief allows the process of narrating and listening to oneself and to Others to be a factor is seeking new professional identities and new knowledge. Thus, the brief is a pedagogical tool for critical reflection that reinvents the person's care with him or herself and the care for Others, a fact that is extremely important both for the future health professional and for the educator.