Cultural aspects and the work of community health workers: community values and health services
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Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazilian Association of Public Health/Scholarship by Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), Brazil
Publication date: 2023-04-26
Popul. Med. 2023;5(Supplement):A1752
ABSTRACT
Background and Objective:
The study analyzes how cultural aspects influence the work process of the Community Health workers (CHWs) in the service daily life, considering culture as a factor that conform the profile of care provided the population.
Methods:
This is a qualitative research with a descriptive approach, carried out in a Family Health Unit in the city of Vitória da Conquista-Bahia, Brazil, with the 10 CHWs participation from teams linked to the Family Health Strategy (FHS). The construction of data took place through the focus group technique. The data were analyzed using the hermeneutic-dialectic technique. We organize into three analytical categories: cultural aspects: contributions to the quality of home visits; cultural boundaries: constituting barriers in the quality of assistance in the daily service; and the interweaving between the work of the CHWs and the health management model.
Results:
The FHS seeks to promote the life quality of the brazilian population, intervening in the factors that put health at risk, in the prevention and health promotion perspective, with an axis of reorientation of the care model based on the principles of universality, equity and integrality, structuring the Unified Health System. In the CHWs perception, the cultural aspects present in the work process interfere, enhancing or weakening, the quality of care performed in the daily servisse. Health workers, users and their families, build webs of relationships based on social interactions, forming symbolic structures, achieved by living in the territory and by establishing bonds.
Conclusions:
We recommend as essential the appropriation of a cultural system for effective assistance in the territory according to the real health needs of the population. Cultural aspects are reference points for intervention at home and in the community, influencing health care practices and impacting on the establishment of a link between user-CHWs-health service-community.