Educational activities in family health program

The family health program (FHP) is active today as a strategy for reorganizing the attention model in health in Brazil. Promotion, prevention and assistance are part of the activities to be done by the teams of FHP. Health promotion activities aim at better life conditions and community life styles, being educational activities, attributed to all team members as one of the strategies for that aim. One of the principles for doing health promotion is empowerment (psychological/individual, organizational, communitarian). Identifying and characterizing educational practices (group activities and house visits by ACS) the present study aims at analyzing if these practices are spaces facilitating empowerment. Two teams of FHP where studied, one urban and one rural, in a district of Bahia. Results reveal that educational activities potentially favor the empowerment psychological/individual, when a preventive vision prevails in the activities of the professionals, reflected in educational activities stimulating specially the adoption of healthy habits. Otherwise, the study show evidences that the educational practices may favor the empowerment organizational and communitarian when health professionals consider the health–sickness process as socially determined, and a consequence of life conditions, not proscribing life styles importance. This widened concept of health, when accompanied with coherent educational activities, promotes professionals to be compromised with the constitution of citizens fighting for the right to better life conditions and health. We finish this study pointing out the importance of human resources for health institutions, of administrators, and of the health team itself, in thinking over the necessary strategies to be implemented, for the actions of the health professionals do not remain limited to prevention activities and promote health.