ABSTRACT
This study considers the political dimension as the relationship that workers have with the public health management at work and its developments in Primary Care (PC) services in different modalities of PC organization. It seeks to discuss the conflict between PC nurses and management regarding the contratualization and recontratualization of the National Program for Access and Quality Improvement in Primary Care (PMAQ-AB) as a manifestation of the political dimension. It is an instrumental and qualitative case study grounded on French discourse analysis. The corpus was constituted by semi-structured interviews with 08 nurses, key informants from the PC of Ribeirão Preto (SP), as well as planning documents of five quadrennium of municipal administration. Data points to an incomplete transition of the PC model, more of a mixture than a transition, with an incipient use of the Family Health Strategy. The relationship between nurses and management lacks trust and coresponsibility. There is no perspective of participation in decision-making processes around the PMAQ-AB, whose implementation focused on bureaucratic aspects while emptying the policy of evaluation of meaning for workers. Despite holding management responsible, nurses are limited to punctual forms of resistance, in the absence of collective negotiation.
KEYWORDS:
Primary Health Care; Community health nursing; Health management; Unified Health System; Health policy