For differentiated and less uneven health care practices: the case of the Special Indigenous Sanitary District of Bahia

Abstract

In this study, we sought to know the meanings of the principle of “differentiated health care” through the analysis of narratives and practices from managers of the Subsystem of Indigenous People’s Health Care in Bahia, Brazil, to reveal how their social, political, and cultural bases can contribute or not to its operationalization. It is assumed that the provision of effectively differentiated health care actions, which consider the socio-cultural specificities of indigenous peoples and their traditional medicine, can contribute to a greater resolution of health services targeted for these peoples and mitigation of some social determinants of their ways of living and dying. Thus, a qualitative study with an ethnographic approach was developed, using participant observation techniques and semi-structured interviews with managers of the Subsystem in Bahia. Data collection took place between September 2014 and March 2017. The narratives often revealed a rhetorical tone of the idea of “differentiated health care” as an initiative to respect indigenous cultural specificities, which were insistently used as a justification for not conducting differentiated practices (as specific protocols, for example). The presence of indigenous people in the management contributed for producing more contextualized practices, oriented to the problems experienced by the communities, but the effort to legitimize themselves in this social space ratifies a “white” hegemony in the main topic of discussions.