EDITORIAL

The first text of volume 11, issue 3 of Trabalho, Educação e Saúde is the essay titled Innovative proposals in vocational training for the Unified Health System. Authored by Dinair da Hora et al., its central theme are the proposals made by the Independent Commission, formed by professionals from different countries, whose purpose is to produce guidance for training with a focus on health promotion. The association between the commodification of higher education and the use of management structures guided by the logic of competitiveness are the backdrop on which the questions raised by the article titled Outsourcing educator work under the light of the social responsibility of higher education, by Adolfo Ignacio Calderon, are built. The author puts into debate the extent to which there is ethical coherence between what is taught in the classroom and the actual managerial practices.

The proposed adoption of innovative pedagogical benchmarks permeates several training documents in the healthcare area. Solange Reis and Roseli Esquerdo Lopes' article titled Innovations of the past century: Origins of the educational benchmarks in vocational training in health investigates the pedagogical principles that recur most in official documents and explores the relationship between these principles and the non-directive pedagogies formulated based on child education.

The design of the social profile and the community health worker's performance profile refers to experiences and political debates that took place throughout the twentieth century and included the participation of international institutional players. Primary healthcare and the community social worker profile in historical perspective, by Angelica Ferreira Fonseca, Marcia Valéria Morosini and Maria Helena Mendonça, retrieves and discusses important topics of this dispute, contributing to the understanding of the characteristics that are currently delineated for this worker in the context of the Unified Health System (SUS).

Social representations of health education of family health team professionals is the article authored by Maria Flávia Gazinelli et al. In the study, the authors thematize the representations about the actual educational practice and health education. The research subjects were 240 professionals from 20 basic health units. The results show that among physicians and nurses, 'empowerment' and 'prevention' stand out as likely central elements of this representation. In the community health worker and nursing assistant group, the core elements of representation refer to the terms 'education' and 'prevention.' The authors point out that, according to their research, health education remains aimed at preventing disease through the provision of information on hygiene and healthy habits.

The interfaces between the context of struggle and the everyday life of rural women and the health-illness processes, coupled with popular education, are issues that come together, leading to the reflection of the article titled Contributions of the peasant women movement to training in health, by Vanderleia Laodete Pulga. The prospect that popular resistance coupled with the affirmation of their own ways of thinking about the health practices and policies, as well as the SUS, are central in the author's ethical and political discussion.

The deconstruction of social rights that permeates the logic of capitalist societies points to the continuing need for the population's mobilization and participation in the construction and implementation of public policies. Based on this assumption, Danubia Rocha Vieira et al., in Participation, citizenship, and public policies: Building health in popular organization spaces, analyze the characteristics of the participation of a few popular organizations in health. Among the various discussions brought up in the text, the authors call attention to the fact that in instances of participation connected with the health sector there is a distancing from the expanded concept of health in favor of a biological view. They also note the need to move forward in order for participation to be understood as the subjects' personal autonomy and as an increase of the collective decision-making power.

Technological advances in health care have made increasing child birth chances feasible and, meanwhile, increased the number of severely ill neonates in intensive care units, ICUs. This picture leads to the need for professional qualification. In the study titled Educational program for Brazilian neonatal and pediatric intensive care units, Edna Aparecida Bussotti et al. evaluate 13 public hospitals in Northern, Northeastern, and Midwestern Brazil based on the analysis of compliance with ten criteria. In the discussion, the authors reflect on the importance of deploying the SUS' Development Support Program (PROADI-SUS) and conclude that it contributes to increasing rates of compliance with most of the criteria that guided the assessment.

The tension between technical and scientific training and training that values human relations is present in the teaching of the professions that focus on care. In Josiane Bernart Ferla's study Emphasis on interpersonal relations in the basic training of nurses in the ethical-humanistic paradigm, graduates and faculty of a nursing course are approached in interviews and a questionnaire designed to put into the training provided into discussion. Three categories were formed based on the analysis of the interviews: interdisciplinarity/disciplinarity/dichotomy between theory and practice, interpersonal relations/interpersonal skills. The author's discussion summarizes a few of the challenges the training given to nurses comes up against when faced with the importance of this professional, establishing a less mechanized relationship with the user, one in which both can stand as subjects valued in their multiple dimensions.

In Views and practices of community caregivers in providing care to children aged fewer than three years, by Victoria Montrone Aida et al., the researchers highlight a frequent occurrence in the Brazilian reality - the care community caregivers give to children in non-institutionalized spaces - to investigate these women's perceptions on child care. The study shows that the caregivers understand that caring equates to meeting hygiene, nutrition and emotional needs and providing physical protection.

This issue also features an account written by Maria Socorro Linhares et al. titled Education for Work and Health Surveillance Program, in which the discussion centers on the educational experience of students of medicine, dentistry and nursing, in Sobral, Ceará.

Psychoanalysis and politics are the central topics in the interview granted by Christian Dunker to Hellington Chianca Couto.

The issue is concluded with two reviews. In the first, Marco Aurélio Santana, examines the book A construção da sociedade do trabalho no Brasil: uma investigação sobre a persistência secular das desigualdades, authored by Adalberto Cardoso, which deals with social inequality in Brazil. The second, by Milena Silva dos Santos, Lucia Hisako Takase Gonçalves, and Marília de Fátima Vieira de Oliveira, analyzes O que é saúde?, by Naomar de Almeida Filho, in which the author faces the challenges that come up on several planes by the enhancement of the health concept.

Angélica Ferreira Fonseca

Carla Macedo Martins

Marcela Alejandra Pronko

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  11 Sept 2013
• Date of issue
  Dec 2013