Abstract
With the instrumentalization of the health policy, planning, and management area, the public health physicians’ political ethos has been being put into question in their training. Thus, we aimed to characterize the curricular components related to this area in undergraduate courses in collective health in Brazil. In June 2014, a secondary data survey of the curricular matrices was carried out on the Ministry of Education’s website, the unit of analysis of which was the curricular component, using the reference term for undergraduate courses in collective health as a parameter. The courses present ‘collective health’ as the main denomination (60%). Most of the courses are spread in the Northern and Southeastern regions (27%) and in public institutions (93%). On the contents in the nomenclatures, ‘health planning’ is the most cited (up to seven times in the same matrix) and in 60 percent of the total courses; 87 percent of the courses do not feature the term ‘Unified Health System’ as a component name. It was concluded that without a curricular standardization future public health physicians will have different profiles, acting in a more specific perspective leaning towards a more planning management format and with gaps regarding the political contents and the ideological defense of the Unified Health System.
policies, planning and administration in health; college education; Unified Health System; public health; management in health