Family Health Strategy in the Supplemental Health System: convergences and contradictions

Abstract

A qualitative research shows the convergences and contradictions at the implementation of the Family Health Strategy (FHS) at the Supplemental Health System at São Paulo city-Brazil. Identify the concept of family health by upper formation professionals of a self management company and understand the performance ways of these professionals at FHS and to identify the possibilities and the limits lived by these professionals at the implementation of the FHS at the company. There were made interviews with 14 professionals and the content analysis was made. The results show that the concept of family health seems to transit between the hegemonic model and the idealized model of integral attention to health, with its bases at health promotion actions, however always linked with illnesses prevention, multidisciplinary work, and the logic of the reduction of the costs of the system. Despite the search for new forms of customer service, contradictions had been identified that make it difficult the implementation of proposals based on the Health Promotion. There are necessary investments of politic kind, organizational, financial, and fundamentally, at the formation and permanent education of the professionals.