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 proposes to analyze the conceptions of professional education for public health agents (agentes de saúde pública - ASP) that are present in the formulation of the Training Programme for Local Agents of Surveillance in Health (Proformar) and assess how well these conceptions are understood by the programme's tutors in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. This is an empirical research, using a qualitative approach, with analysis of documentary sources and semi-structured interviews with the Proformar tutors working in Rio de Janeiro. The research results show that Proformar's objective of training the ASP to become environmental surveyors with a critical vision is understood by the tutors in so far as they understand that the construction of the identity of the Brazilian Health System's secondary level worker happens in his/her work process through the understanding of the territory-population as a space for the social production of health. The tutors assimilate the conceptions of the ASP's professional education that point to a rupture with the concept of competence based on the market/production logic and move on to an appreciation of the workers' experiences and of their development as political subjects.
Article
The objective of this work is to verify the nature of the relationship between the members of family health teams and also how they perform at work. This was done by identifying themes that promote convergence and divergence between professionals that were divided, for this purpose, into two groups: those with high education and those with secondary education. Methodologically, we developed a qualitative study, using focal group technique, to determine the views and perceptions of the PSF team members about the training courses they attended and about the activities developed in the Family Health Units. The themes covered were five, namely: team's training, team's responsibilities, stand-by support for the PSF, relationship with the community and the PSF as a care model. The themes that led to greater consensus between the two groups were team's training and stand-by support for the PSF. The other themes - team's responsibilities, relationship with the community and PSF as a care model - led to disagreements. The research also enabled us to verify that are some problems in the relationship between team members and limitations in their performance with respect to integrated and interdisciplinary actions.
Article
This article is a product of research work about initiatives of curricular innovation based on the National Curricular Guidelines (DCN) and carried out in State medical schools in the states of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. One of these schools is connected with the Programme to Promote Curricular Changes in Medical Education (Promed). In the analysis of the empirical material, three questions - respectively of a methodological, political and historic-cultural and scientific nature - correspond to what we present in this article, namely: the discussion about the innovation concept; the various developments of the analysis of the speeches, that enable us to draw a profile of the current situation of the medical education in the selected institutions, and thus to have a clear picture of the pedagogical perspectives and conceptions in medical education and estimate the knowledge levels of the DCN, from the teachers' and pupils' points of view; and the students' expectations with regard to the training and its connection with the world of work. The methodology selected follows the principles of qualitative research and, for this reason, we used the focal group interview technique. This technique gives us the empirical material that, analyzed theoretically, is presented once more to the actors (teachers, administrators, and students) inserted in practical activities oriented to the curricular innovations.
Article
This article proposes a methodology to estimate the occupational dimension of the Health Care sector and emphasizes the essential role played by this sector in the generation of jobs and in the improvement of the qualification profile of the Brazilian labour market. The assumption underlying the analysis is that, for the health care sector, as for the other segments connected with social policy, labour is the central element in the organization of their activities. Although the new technologies may help, they can only replace the human resources in a very limited number of activities. Since an important part of the risks inherent to care cannot be reversed, and must, therefore, be systematically prevented, health care requires the constant elaboration of policies concerned with the qualification and regulation of human resources in health. The analysis is based on data from the 2000 Demographic Census and from the Annual Relation of Social Information for the year 2001.
Article
The purpose of this article is to present some results of a research that, by articulating the research and a training programme, analysed the relationship between health and work in the schools of Great Vitória (State of Espírito Santo). The epistemological perspective underlying the research was centred on the activity of work. Our method for the production of knowledge was implemented by building a space for a dialogue between the knowledge that results from the teachers' experience and that produced by the researchers themselves. With this objective in mind, we designed a work plan that included, in its first stage, the application of the questionnaire SRQ and, on the basis of the results obtained, the construction of a Training-Investigation Programme on Health and Work in the Schools of Great Vitória for the teachers. One of the major results of the latter was the beginning of the construction, in each school, and between the Great Vitória schools, of a network to debate about the health-work relations (being implemented through a web site) and the expansion of the research-training process to other municipalities of the State. The research results indicate the urgent need for research methods that will give priority to the teachers' experiences as indispensable knowledge for understanding the relationship health and work in schools.
Ensaio
The present essay focuses on the relationship between knowledge, power and ethics. At the start of a new millennium, many are the implications of the achievements in the sciences of life, as the repercussions of these achievements have consequences for the health professionals' everyday work and bring up to date the doubts on what is or is not 'good' for the human being. In mankind's trajectory, life (of the human being, of nature and of other beings not belonging to the human species) is the motive and the objective of learning. In the biotechnological context, we ask: to what extent are we distancing ourselves from this primary motive? In seeking an answer for this question, this essay, looks, in particular, at the work of Martin Buber, Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Lévinas. Eu e Tu, O princípio da responsabilidade and Humanismo do outro homem are works in which the 'alterity' is considered to be the motive of ethics. 'The other's presence' is the basis for the ethical encounter. The encounter with that which is 'different from me' initiates the 'act of knowing' and ethics.
Debate
This paper discusses the role distance education plays in the training of health professionals, in particular with regard to the democratization of opportunities, in the context of the strategies for the consolidation of the Brazilian Health System (SUS). Grounded on the experience of the Course of Pedagogical Training in Professional Education in the Area of Health: Nursing (run by the Secretariat of Health Work and Education Management of the Ministry of Health), the text presents strategies that, in this modality, are able to introduce pedagogical proposals related to the kind of public policies that, regarding education in the area of health as a social right, attempt to respond to the demands for this type of education. Verifying the need for more projects of this nature in the field of health, and being aware of the fears both teachers and pupils have of the 'electronic sirens' singing' and of the risk that this type of training may become too superficial or too detached from reality, we reaffirm our belief that distance education is, more than anything else, genuine education.
Debate
The growing integration of the Information and Communication Technologies with communication and educational processes requires new forms of organizing and transmitting knowledge. With this in mind, the present article examines distance education (educação a distância - EaD) pointing to the risks involved in mistaking technical innovation for pedagogical innovation; and it also gives emphasis to the importance of transferring the focus of the debate on EaD from 'modality' to 'method', and from teaching organization to forms of teaching and of learning. For this purpose, we must consider the two dimensions of technique - as an object of study and as a pedagogical tool - and also the interdisciplinary character of education. The approach we present here is set over against the technicist conception of teaching. It removes technology from the centre of the educational process and emphasizes the latter's historical and social dimension. In our view, more than being a way to fill the gaps in the educational system, EaD tends to become a regular element in the current teaching systems and, if it is carried out with a open teaching perspective and integrated with conventional teaching, it can help to make the access to education more democratic.
Debate
Con este artículo se pretende continuar con el debate y las reflexiones acerca de la Educación a Distancia (EaD). Para ello se propone: en primer lugar, algunas consideraciones generales que tienen que ver con la Educación a Distancia y el uso de las Nuevas Tecnologías de la Información y de la Comunicación (NTIC) y su desarrollo en la sociedad actual. En segundo lugar, y pensado muy especialmente en la formación de formadores, se pasa a plantear la necesidad de construir una 'didáctica crítica', que rompa con los modelos de tipo tecnicista que hasta hoy han sido preponderantes en la EaD. De ese modo, se intentan recuperar o bien abordar las dimensiones políticas y éticas de la didáctica y el desarrollo de sujetos y profesionales críticos.
Debate
This article relates an experience of cooperation through a network of institutions oriented to the training of health technicians, under the guidance of the Pan-American Health Organization (OPS). It also deals with present changes in the field and with the new human resources policies, with their respective implications in the world of work and of education. The experience may be regarded as an attempt to integrate the social-affective and technical processes that give strength and dynamism to the Network of Health Technicians (Rets). We examine its creation, objectives, structure and organization, as well as the OPS' management and the role of the institutional actors called Development Nuclei (Nudes) and their stimulating projects. Finally, we point to the advantages and progressive characteristics of the work done by professionals in the various Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean countries. We focus in particular on the innovative management mechanisms in technical cooperation when we discuss the factors that affect the sustainability and the possibility of success of network experiences that have the potential to mobilize and articulate horizontal cooperation in a globalized world.
Review
Resenha
Interview
Public Health and Education are the main areas to which Professor Victor Vincent Valla has been devoting himself since he arrived in Brazil in the 60s. Graduated in Education, with a Master degree and a PhD in Social History by the University of São Paulo (USP) and a post-doctoral degree by the University of California, Valla is now titular researcher at the Samuel Pessoa Department of Endemic Diseases of the National School of Public Health Sergio Arouca (Ensp), researcher at the Research Laboratory for Practices of Integrality in Health (Lappis) and assistant professor at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UFF). Valla is the author of a large number of works on culture, social participation, civil rights and religiosity, in which he explores the intrinsic relationship between these themes and the field of education in the area of health. In this interview, he discusses the concept and the practices of popular education, the notion of 'technical training', religious culture, poverty and public health, giving emphasis to the need to understand the perceptions and everyday life of the less privileged classes and strongly suggesting that this understanding can significantly improve the training of health professionals and, consequently, the Brazilian Health System (SUS).
Memory