Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Since the implementation of the current Brazilian Health System (Sistema Único de Saude - SUS), there has been a trend to change medical school curricula regarding primary care and community-centered activities, in an attempt to replace the predominant hospital-centered teaching model, and to graduate more general practitioners. The current national guidelines for medical schools' curricula support this orientation; however, many medical schools present with difficulties to change their curricula, especially considering the lack of tradition that Public Health disciplines face as a primary field of practice, when compared to highly specialized fields. In the present study, which used qualitative methods with an exploratory-descriptive approach, field study, and data analyses by content analysis, a data collection instrument was administered to students of two different medical schools, aiming at understanding their perceptions regarding the importance Public Health disciplines have on their education; the characteristics of these disciplines on the two different schools; and the students' satisfaction with these disciplines. The results have demonstrated that students surely consider Public Health disciplines important for their medical education, acknowledging that concepts regarding the public health system and the physician's role in primary health care are invaluable to newly-graduated physicians. Satisfaction with the discipline varied between the two medical schools analyzed, with students of the school that prioritizes Public Health horizontally along the entire course being more satisfied and considering themselves capable of working within the public health system as soon as they are graduated. Data allows us to perform a critical analysis of the way Public Health disciplines are inserted in these two different medical schools, suggesting the need to more deeply insert them along the years of study, starting early, and prioritizing practical activities, aiming at sparking a higher degree of interest among the students, and consequently leading to a higher number of professionals seeking this field after graduation.
Highlights
The teaching of Medicine in undergraduate courses in the 20th century went through constant changes
A first phase is established with the Flexner Report, published in the United States in 1910, which tried to guide the American medical teaching through the so-called biomedical model, with learning eminently using the tertiary hospital as a scenario, with a rationale of teaching subspecialties, and with little emphasis on prevention and health promotion (TEMPSK e BORBAM, 2009)
The International Conference of the World Health Organization (WHO), in 1978, reinforced this ideological model of integral medicine, and the importance of the training of a general practitioner, who works in Primary Health Care (PHC), implementing several proposals, such as Family and Community Medicine, in response to the high costs of the medical care model, and the inadequacy of the population coverage of the current model at the time (GONÇALVES et al, 2009; TEMPSK and BORBAM, 2009)
Summary
The teaching of Medicine in undergraduate courses in the 20th century went through constant changes. In Public Health practice, most of the time, the physician’s main role involves actions of preventive medicine, primary health care, not necessarily only in the Brazilian health system, and in supplementary health It has been practiced for many years in England, Canada, and the United States, where it already enjoys some recognition in the medical field, Public Health as the physician's field of action had to overcome several obstacles, such as low career valorization, insufficient professional qualification, low salaries, and little social prestige, characteristics still widely observed in Brazil. The present study aimed to investigate students’ perceptions about the Public Health discipline in their medical education
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