Abstract
ABSTRACT The approval of the More Doctors Program has triggered a number of readjustments of the National Curricular Guidelines (DCNs) for Medical Education, like the creation of a mental health internship integrated into the health service and community. Due to this demand, the higher education institutions have been encouraged to innovate in their teaching-learning methodologies in order to guarantee a generalist, humanistic and critical professional education. We report the experience of a private higher education institution in the implementation of a mental health internship in consonance with the new DCNs. We present all the steps of the implementation, reporting the participation of students, supervisors, preceptors and managers. We show that a mental health internship linked to different levels of healthcare promotes learning conditions capable of favoring the decentralization of care and application of the community/family approach.
Highlights
With the increase in the prevalence and severity of mental disorders in the Brazilian and world populations[1,2,3], the mental health area started to play a fundamental role in the education of the generalist doctor, posing new challenges for higher education institutions
One of the changes was that Mental Health was removed from Medical Clinic and became a specific area adjusted to the program’s principles[4]
In light of this scenario, the new DCNs establish that 70% of the number of internship hours must include essential aspects of the Mental Health areas, as well as of Medical Clinic, Surgery, Gynecology-Obstetrics, Pediatrics, and Collective Health[5]
Summary
With the increase in the prevalence and severity of mental disorders in the Brazilian and world populations[1,2,3], the mental health area started to play a fundamental role in the education of the generalist doctor, posing new challenges for higher education institutions. Education in Medicine includes, as a stage of the undergraduate course, an obligatory and supervised curricular internship for in-service education, performed at the institution’s own health services or through partnerships under an Education-Health Public Action Organizational Contract (COAPES) entered into with Municipal and State Health Departments This contract guarantees access to all the health establishments as practice scenarios for education in the sphere of undergraduate courses and residencies in the area of health, and establishes the parties’ duties related to the functioning of the teaching-service-community integration[6]. 3088/20117, which instituted the Psychosocial Care Network (RAPS), mental health was integrated into all care levels and spaces in the Brazilian National Health System (SUS) This expanded considerably the scenario of the teaching-learning process and requires that higher education institutions provide effective conditions for the medicine student to experience all situations. Some questions arise: How can we articulate the spaces of the mental health network so that students can access all of them? How can we make mental health learning become significant and humanized, in consonance with the profile of a generalist doctor? In view of the need to adjust medical education in Brazil according to the new DCNs, we report, in the present article, the experience of implementation of the mental health internship in a private higher education institution
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