In-service training for primary health care: A distance education initiative in Brazil

As Primary Health Care strategy is being expanded in Brazil, massive professional training became one of its major challenges. The course for specialization in Primary Health Care and Family Health is an in-service training which is delivered by Federal University of Minas Gerais through a national program from Ministry of Education, Open University of Brazil. It is a distance learning initiative which aims to train physicians, nurses and dentists who are working directly within Family Health Teams. This initiative, which started on January 2008, is also interdisciplinary, as it involves many scholar units within the university, such as the Faculty of Education (via UNESCO´s Chair for Distance Education), the Faculty of Medicine, the School of Nursing and the Faculty of Dentistry. So far it has offered 800 vacancies, which have been equally distributed through 9 regional poles widely spread in state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. This work intends to present the evaluation of students´first impressions about the new learning process. Online questionnaires were applied, focusing on evaluation of face-to-face meetings, learning environment, didactic material and tutors´ performance, as well as facilities and challenges for studying through a distance course. Both Likert scale and opened, qualitative questions were used. Stata^® software was used to analyze quantitative data, whereas both Sphinx Lexica^® and NVivo 8^® were used for qualitative data in different steps. Individual motivation, possibility of interaction among colleagues, quality of didactic material and the will for making a better work have been seen as the most important advantages, whereas poor internet access, work overload and family problems are the major obstacles. It has also become clear that tutors play an important role to avoid attrition. Some students have experienced troubles in accessing or using the environment. However, according to most of them, it has been improved continuously.