Medical education in Brazil: public health as a didactic-pedagogical structure

Abstract

Abstract Medical education in Brazil has a Flexnerian structure whose guidelines were instituted in the Americas in the early twentieth century, which led the academic to settle in the office and in the hospital with a focus on the biological processes of the health-disease process. However, since the 1970s, increasing social inequality in Brazil has led to marked poverty with a lack of access to basic health care for most of the Brazilian population. The 1988 Federal Constitution treats health as a democratic process where the social issue is fundamental to the development of the nation. The Italian health movement, guided by social studies by Giovanni Berlinguer, inspired the Brazilian Health Reform Movement. In this regard, the hospital-centered view began to be questioned. Wide critical-reflexive movements were being built in society and in the academy, looking for improvements in the population's quality of life. Issues related to promotion, treatment and prevention, both in medical training and in management and assistance, were gradually being incorporated into medical education. But it was in the national medical education change project that the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN), launched in 2014, culminated. The medical course at the Federal University of Fronteira Sul - Chapecó campus (UFFS-Ch), in the state of Santa Catarina, was created in 2015, fully complies with the new guidelines and is supported by the Public Health. This orientation is guided by the political, economic and social development of the Country within a civilizing process that is based on the social and environmental determinants of health, with respect to the relations of society in its history and in its territory. In this way, medical training at UFFS has a vision of the health-disease process that transcends the individual and addresses the community, with a proposal to transform society based on democracy and social justice. Key messages To present a counterpoint between the Brazilian Health Reform and its inspiring one, an Italian, in the search to overcome social inequality, through a civilizing process based on Democracy and Health. To present a medical course based on the transformation of medical education with a structure in Public Health in order to provide a reduction in social inequality in Brazil.