EDITORIAL

Enhancing the concept of health requires making questions about the ways approaching care and practices that have become hegemonic. This implies in building dialogue about the scientificity studies produced in modern day and regarding the excluding nature of the knowledge of the field of integrative practices, such as acupuncture and homeopathy. Developing the discussion about teaching and the national policy on integrative practices, Eliane de Azevedo and Maria Cecília Pelicioni wrote the essay titled Integrative and complementary practices of challenges for education, the piece that opens Volume 9, number 3 of Trabalho, Educação e Saúde.

The social movement in the field uniquely exposes the relationships between conditions of life and health. In part, this is because at the settlements, such as the one where the empirical survey that gave rise to the article titled Health and work relations in a rural settlement of the MST in the Brazil-Paraguay border region, by Eduardo Espíndola et al., was carried out, one experiences indivisibility from the political struggle, labor and daily life. As such, this article allows the reader to think about the singularities of this population and puts the limelight on the importance the use of pesticides takes on as a risk to one's health.

The concept of risk, as used previously, is associated with the conception of damage, harm for health. However, this is but a part of the possible readings on risk, and this is what Thiago Drumond Moraes discusses in Positivity of risk and health: contributions of studies on work for public health. Moraes argues that the power of life contained in the experiences public health rates as risky should be reflected on carefully, under the penalty of our adopting a reduced view of the complexity of the health care actions.

The dynamics of the workers in the health care industry is discussed in Workforce turnover rates in the municipal health network in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais: a case study, by Leyla Gomes Sancho et al. Turnover rates seen in 17 categories in the assistant, technician, and higher levels are examined based on a set of variables defined in the survey. To produce objective information to subsidize the proposed analysis, the authors devised a parameter for the ambulatory context. Among the conclusions is the potential municipal management policies have to interfere aiming to help professionals set roots.

The work of nurses in the management of health care units has been the topic of research that is increasingly incorporated into the studies on collective health. However, its development is still disproportionate with the historical presence of these workers in managerial activities. In The work of manager nurses and their professional training, Ludmila Xavier-Gomes and Thiago Luiz Barbosa set into motion a qualitative survey to investigate, together with managing nurses, the understanding of the relationships among management work, the nurses' identity and their schooling. The study shows that this schooling allows for an approximation with the management area, but a way to qualify nurses to work in this position has not yet been developed.

The recognition of the worker is one of the basic issues in the discussion on valuing the work of middlel-evel professionals in health. Elaine da Costa and Danyege Ferreira's Community health agent perceptions and motivations about the labor process in Teresina, Piauí retakes this topic in order to reflect on the insertion of community agents. It is shown that there is a lack of recognition, both in the community and services and at the institutional levels of management, leading these workers to perceive a lack of support from management, unlike the Unified Health System's official discourse, which ranks them as strategic to change the model of care.

Because it is work that materializes at the meeting point between at least two subjects - the user and the professional -, health care can only be transformed and qualified if the elements that cross this space are also acknowledged and problematized. This is the purpose of the article titled Relationships between health professionals and users throughout health care practices, written by Maria Denise Schimith et al., which assumes the analysis of the literature as a way to organize and summarize the knowledge on the topic, allowing the reader do monitor, in the several studies, the contradictory movements of this field that point to the transformation of these relationships in order to render them more emancipatory while, at the same time, conserve a biological view of care.

As was the case with the previous article, Karina Stroschein and Denise Zocche's Permanent education in health services: a study on the experience gained in Brazil uses an integrative revision approach to analyze permanent education in health experiments carried out with funding by the national policy for the area and that gave origin to publications made between 2004 and 2010. Through the discussions brought up by the authors, it is possible to notice adherence to the conception that qualification extrapolates technical mastery to reach the spaces of the relationships that pass over the quadrilateral concept of training that blends education, management, care and social control.

This edition also includes the account The community health worker in Angola: challenges to primary health care and to health professional education, in which Ana Lucia Pontes, Vera Joana Bornstein and Camila Giugliani causes us to reflect on the similarities and differences between work experiences and training of community health agents, pointing out the limits and possibilities for cooperation between Brazil and Angola in delimiting the profile of this professional.

Two reviews close this number: Renake Bertholdo das Neves makes a critique of Estrutura social e formas de consciência II: a dialética da estrutura e da história (Social structure and forms of awareness II: the dialectics of structure and history) the latest book of István Mészáros published in Brazil; and Marcela Pronko takes a look at João Márcio Mendes Pereira's book O Banco Mundial como ator político, intelectual e financeiro (The World Bank as a political, intellectual and financial player).

Angélica Ferreira Fonseca

Carla Macedo Martins

Isabel Brasil Pereira

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  13 Dec 2011
• Date of issue
  Nov 2011