The dental professional after productive restructuring: ethics, the job market and dental public health

Abstract

Objective: to uncover ethical problems in dental professionals' new labor reality after productive restructuring. Methods: exploratory and descriptive qualitative research, carried out through an individual, semi-structured interview with 10 dental professionals within a universe of 30 interviewees. The analysis method was Textual Discourse Analysis. Results: 1. Ethical problems in the dental job market after the productive restructuring: the new reality of health plans, private health insurance and popular clinics does not seem to meet the professionals' needs; rather, it seems to meet the needs of the market, entailing diversified ethical problems. A growing inter-peer resentment seems to be directly related to the crisis in the job market and to transforming the old concurrence into competitiveness; and 2. Transformations in dental public health: it debates the social need constructing excellence in public health dentistry as an ethical problem, different from the logic of the market. Conclusion: a professional crisis points at different ethical problems: transformations in the job market strengthen a commercial sense in the profession, building business configurations with increased capital accumulation in realities of precarious labor; the exclusive action of the dental public health professional stimulates his leading role in transformations towards a new professional excellence: that of the public service.