Representações sociais de usuários e trabalhadores da Atenção Primária à Saúde sobre as práticas integrativas e complementares em saúde

Abstract

Introduction: Integrative and Complementary Health Practices are ways of promoting health and preventing and recovering from illnesses, through techniques that seek to approach the human being in its biological, psychological and social dimensions; they use therapeutic resources that aim to bring people closer to themselves, to others and to the social environment and allow interaction between the user and health workers who bring with them representations about the health-disease binomial, which are revealed during therapeutic treatment. Objective: to analyze the social representations of users and health workers who work in Primary Health Care about Integrative and Complementary Health Practices, based on the Theory of Social Representations. Methodology: exploratory and qualitative research, carried out in the health units of the Coastal Health District of the municipality of Camaçari, Bahia, Brazil. The participants were 23 users and 7 workers of Primary Health Care. For data collection, semistructured interviews were used. The project was approved by the CEP with Opinion number 6,593,803. The collected data were processed using the Iramuteq software and submitted to similarity analysis and content analysis. After capturing the core meanings, we arrived at the following categories: user understanding of Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; experiences lived by users with Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; difficulties/limits for user access to treatment through Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; and facilities/possibilities for user access to treatment through Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; social representations of health workers about Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; strategies used by health workers for the development of Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; difficulties/limitations experienced by health workers for the implementation of Integrative and Complementary Health Practices; and facilities/possibilities revealed by health workers to carry out Integrative and Complementary Health Practices. Results: the social representations revealed by users and health workers of Primary Health Care about Integrative and Complementary Health Practices indicate a paradigmatic change, from a biomedical health to a model centered on reception, active listening, more humanized and less mechanistic care and self-care, which still faces resistance to its insertion and implementation, due to lack of knowledge or unjustifiable fear that Integrative and Complementary Health Practices will take the space that is currently hegemonic of biomedicine. Final considerations: given the lack of a municipal policy on Integrative and Complementary Health Practices and the fact that their provision is restricted to a few health units, making it more challenging to universalize care, we consider it important to invest in the organization of the health system and in the recruitment and training of human resources. The results of the study generated the following technical products: Educational Booklet on Integrative and Complementary Health Practices for users and health workers and the intervention project “Integrative and Complementary Health Practices in Action in Primary Health Care: an interventionist approach focused on auriculotherapy”.