Reflections on Public Health training and its articulation with research and in(ter)vention within the set of practices and services

Abstract

Based on the authors’ experiences working within the Brazilian National Health System (SUS) this paper aims to reflect on education actions in health, considering its intersection with research and intervention in the set of practices and services. In daily practices, the propositions of change and, at the same time, the insistence on the permanence of the hegemonic biomedical model are present, and contradictions among competing paradigms that support different models in the Public Health field arise. The strategic importance of the University surfaces with its various scopes of action (research, teaching and extension programs) as a place for learning experiences based on critical thinking and directed to community needs. In addition, we expect that knowledge may be produced through integration strategies between teaching-health services-community. In times of funding cuts that jeopardize the SUS’s future, supporting and defending universal health care require reflections and actions oriented towards educational processes that take into account the reality of the population, and research methods that act as an apparatus to produce knowledge capable of changing the way health is perceived by workers, users and managers from a biomedical model towards a perspective that contemplates various dimensions and understands health as the production of life.