Globalization and health: challenges for collective health nursing in the edge of the third millenium

Abstract

Under the influence of the world processes of globalization and internationalization of markets, the expansion and consolidation of the neoliberal economic model are also expressed in Brazil in the health field. The morbidity and mortality indicators translate the processes of social exclusion that deprive the citizenship of at least 30 million Brazilians placed below the poverty line, in a clear expression of inequality. Alternatives for the construction and proposition of strategies that allow the overcoming of such reality can be searched for in the theoretical body of Collective Health. Once understood the concept of health-disease that underlies it, its methodological anchorage, the resulting intervention projects, as well as the width and the dynamics of the changes that it proposes, it can be distinguished from Public Health. This approach points out the need to re-build the history of Collective Health in the 70's, as a political movement against the social and political situation in most of the Latin American countries. The reconstruction of this historical movement allows Nursing to better understand the current conjuncture in order to assume social role in the health production process.