The health-disease process and the family health strategy: the user's perspective

Débora De Souza Santos,Silvana Martins Mishima,Mércia Zeviane Brêda,Elainey De Albuquerque Tenório

doi:10.1590/0104-1169.0002.2496

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: to analyze the meanings Primary Health Care users attribute to their health-disease process and the services used. METHODS: this qualitative research uses the focus group technique to interview two groups of users the service monitors. The first is a group of elderly people and the second of pregnant women. To analyze the meanings, the discourse analysis technique and the reference framework of health promotion are used. RESULTS: the group of elderly, being mostly female arterial hypertension and diabetes mellitus patients, visualizes the health-disease process as the evolution of human existence controlled by divine power, signifying the health service as a blessing in the control of the disease. The Group of young pregnant women signified health as the ability for self-care and disease as the disability for that purposes, considering the Primary Health Care service as responsible for the recovery of individual and family health. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: the users demonstrated dissatisfaction with bureaucratic and vertical relations present at the health services. In each group, it was observed that the meanings for health and disease and meanings of the health service the users elaborated can be related.

Highlights

In the last two decades, the Unified Health System (SUS) has advanced in different aspects, including the expansion of the Family Health Strategy (FHS), the reconfiguration of the management and funding of the system and the legal institutionalization of the deliberation spheres for popular participation
Some authors[1,2], signal weaknesses that make it difficult to consolidate a care model based on health promotion
A model focused on health promotion presupposes that the health-disease process results from social, economic, cultural, ethnic/racial, psychological and behavioral determinants, which can contribute to the emergence of diseases and constitute risk factors for the population and configure their quality of life indices[3]

Summary

Introduction

In the last two decades, the Unified Health System (SUS) has advanced in different aspects, including the expansion of the Family Health Strategy (FHS), the reconfiguration of the management and funding of the system and the legal institutionalization of the deliberation spheres for popular participation. The health needs the users present are constituted based on their interpretation of health and disease This interpretation receives influence from countless biological, social, psychological and economic determinants and conditioning factors, in a constant constitution process of subjectivities[5]. It has been observed, that the health professionals still ignore these aspects, which receive strong influence from the biomedical model, where the work process is impersonal, centered on the cure of an established disease, on the subject’s hospitalization and fragmentation, withdrawing their autonomy regarding their health-disease process, which is that necessary to strengthen health promotion[6]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion