Students’ Perception of Public Health in Medical Education Training

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Since the implementation of the current Brazilian Health System (Sistema Único de Saude - SUS), there has been a trend to change medical school curricula regarding primary care and community-centered activities, in an attempt to replace the predominant hospital-centered teaching model, and to graduate more general practitioners. The current national guidelines for medical schools' curricula support this orientation; however, many medical schools present with difficulties to change their curricula, especially considering the lack of tradition that Public Health disciplines face as a primary field of practice, when compared to highly specialized fields. In the present study, which used qualitative methods with an exploratory-descriptive approach, field study, and data analyses by content analysis, a data collection instrument was administered to students of two different medical schools, aiming at understanding their perceptions regarding the importance Public Health disciplines have on their education; the characteristics of these disciplines on the two different schools; and the students' satisfaction with these disciplines. The results have demonstrated that students surely consider Public Health disciplines important for their medical education, acknowledging that concepts regarding the public health system and the physician's role in primary health care are invaluable to newly-graduated physicians. Satisfaction with the discipline varied between the two medical schools analyzed, with students of the school that prioritizes Public Health horizontally along the entire course being more satisfied and considering themselves capable of working within the public health system as soon as they are graduated. Data allows us to perform a critical analysis of the way Public Health disciplines are inserted in these two different medical schools, suggesting the need to more deeply insert them along the years of study, starting early, and prioritizing practical activities, aiming at sparking a higher degree of interest among the students, and consequently leading to a higher number of professionals seeking this field after graduation.