Promoting Health, Managing Families: an ethnography of implementation of a public policy on health care in Rio Grande do Sul

• Grant number: 11/03995-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2012
• End date: July 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Gabriel de Santis Feltran
• Grantee: Everton de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project intends, as major objective, explore the (politic) process which produces the subjectification of the "population" served by a Health Unity, in the margins of state regulations, in a contemporary context. As specific objective, this project intends to ethnography the implementation of a public policy on health care - the Family Health Strategy (FHS) -, focusing on three distinct, but intrinsically related aspects: 1) interactions between the multiprofessional team and the served families; 2) multiprofessional team internal dynamics of operation and; 3) institutional aspects of health care. To this end, the ethnographical analysis will be held in a Family Health Unity (FHU) in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul, where we intend to accompany the Family Health Team (FHT) consultations. We will form the idea that this team assumes the mediation function between population and State, being the main source of interaction between the local population and the hierarchical, paid and regionalized Brazil's Unified National Health System. We seek, with that, discuss with the FHS studies, developed in the field of Public Health, as well as in the major field of Medicine. The FHT consultations will be the link between the three aspects of the research, since it is in the care that should apply the FHS in the population, taking as reference the standards and laws regarding the operations and activities of FHU. The analysis of these consultations, and the reorganization of family experience of the users from them, will be supported by Foucauldian notions of management, "population" and biopower.