Implementation of new assistance models and redefinition of professional practices: The health teaching-services relationship in southern Brazil

Implementation of new assistance models and redefinition of professional practices: the health teaching-services relationship in southern Brazil
The main factors which influence the insertion of professionals into societies with a regulated work market and where the healthcare system and professional organization are complex and structured, are the assistance modalities, professional competences and technological organization of the work.  This study aimed to evaluate the perspectives of the incorporation of new characteristics in the medical profession profile into the implementation of new practices regarding Primary Healthcare (Family Healthcare) in the teaching-services integration program in Florianópolis, southern Brazil. Through a qualitative approach and the evaluation of programs, the techniques of documental analysis and interviews with professionals/teachers and students of the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) were used.  The analysis revealed that the current type of performance, acting within the municipal Family Healthcare model, and the socialization represented by the experience offered by the university, were potential explicative factors for the comprehension of the incorporation of new identifying characteristics for the students and new variations in the identity of the professionals.  The students recognized the need to acquire new practice and knowledge profiles, in order to recover the ethical and relational principles of medicine, although their desire to specialize remained, viewing the Family Healthcare Program as a promising work market and recognizing the possibility to act as an intermediary.  The implementation of the teaching-services partnership process showed the capacity to intermediate new technological processes for healthcare and to challenge the various actors to adopt a position of transformation and problematization of their own practices.  It was also observed that to know the actors’ perspective of the healthcare systems means to recognize them as social subjects and their professional insertion as essential for the conformation (and analysis) of assistance models.