Team coordinating or managing? The process as a possibility to collective work in family health teams

• Grant number: 10/03718-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: August 01, 2010
• End date: March 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Social Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Sueli Terezinha Ferrero Martin
• Grantee: Rosimeire Aparecida Manoel
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina (FMB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Family Health Strategy (FHS) has been consolidated as the main care model in Basic Attention. Its work process foresees the collective/interdisciplinary performance of multiprofessional teams, which imply to share the planning, task division, cooperation and collaboration among the members. In this way, the importance of team coordinator role, as intercessor in work relations, understanding the group/team does not only consist in meeting of people who share rules and goals. The team comprehension while the group process implicates the relation of interdependency between activity and conscience as essential categories. Then, the research has the goal to describe and to analyze the team coordination process in Family Health, under the professional perspective that develop this activity, both local standard (Primary Care Unit with Family Health - PUFH), and central standard (Municipal Health Office - MHO), for identifying the impacts of their actions for a team work constitution of a collective work perspective. The used theoretical reference was the approach Socio-Historic, ruled in Historic and Dialectic Materialism. The research was done in an average size city in the São Paulo state countryside. Fourteen professionals participated in the research, eleven were coordinators of local PUFH and three coordinators of FHS at central standard. The used tools to collect data were: Record semi-structured interviews and participating observation of team meetings. The professional category that develops the coordinator rule FHS in the cited city, both local and central standard, is Nursing area. The most of the professionals that work in PUFH understand this duty as part of his assignment while nurses in the FHS. However, in the most of the reports, the cited activities as the coordination are limited to management aspects present in unit routines and are under a control perspective. By contrast, the professionals who did not have any formation work to actuate as team coordinators, seen the development of these ones for collective/interdisciplinary work. The municipal management policy shows itself in the central coordinator speech back to the participative management. Therefore, the focus of health practice prioritizes the fulfillment of goals and the individual/curative service to the detriment of total care production, then the management emphasis back to the control. Thus, the work perspective of central coordinator, the same way the local coordinator´s, conducts for the work process. Then, we identified how this is harmful for the work construction in team in a collective work perspective and how the group process shows itself as an important theoretical reference of Social Psychology for this thematic discussion. (AU)