Trilhando caminhos da educação permanente em saúde no Seridó: veredas do agente comunitário de saúde em meio a pandemia da COVID-19

Abstract

The community health agent is the link between the health service and the community, being an instrument in the primary care processes. This category does not have legislation that guarantees the training and qualification of these workers. In this light, continuing education in health is an educational instrument with the potential to generate reflection on the work process, through the proposal of learning to learn. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, several health scenarios had to adapt to the new epidemiological situation. This study intends to describe how the process of permanent health education of community health agents in Currais Novos took place, in preparation for facing the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a descriptive, exploratory, qualitative study with thematic analysis. Through the application of an open online questionnaire, we sought to identify the perceptions of these workers about continuing education in health and the support they had from the network during the Covid-19 pandemic. Fifteen community health agents and three municipal health managers participated in the research, who were able to expose their perspectives on continuing health education, its relationship with coping with the pandemic and the co-responsibility of other actors, capable of helping to combat the situation. disease caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus. This study made it possible to understand that most community health agents know what permanent health education means and believe that this occurs in their daily work. Health management, inserted in this context, also evaluated that it could have given greater support to community health agents with qualifications and interactions with the category. Therefore, this study showed that continuing health education is capable of exposing the weaknesses of the network, since there were obstacles in the implementation of training processes for community health agents in the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the National Policy on Permanent Education in Health in Brazil has limitations because it assigns a large part of the responsibility to the health worker, excluding conditions of the service that make these professional categories vulnerable. Finally, the management transmitted relevant information about the epidemiological scenario to some key actors, who may not have reached the community health agents to foster discussions and reflections.