Health Comprehensiveness in Medical Education in Brazil: State of the Question

ABSTRACT Medical education has been leading important transformations in the initial decades of the 21st century in Brazil, seeking to redirect the training offered, in order to meet the principles and guidelines of the Sistema Único de Saúde [Unified Health System] – the universal national health system of Brazil. The main goal of this study is to investigate comprehensiveness as a guiding axis of graduate-level medical teaching in Brazil, seeking to contribute to discussions on the subject. This is a literature review, inspired by the state of the question approach, which proposes to conduct a targeted bibliographic mapping in order to identify, enhance and highlight the specificity and relevance of the research object. The research was carried out in the second half of 2017, on the databases SciELO and Lilacs, using the search terms “Medical education” and “Comprehensiveness in Health”. As inclusion criteria, only scientific articles published in the period 2007 to 2017 were selected. Based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria, five articles were selected to compose the research data. The analysis and interpretation was based on the analysis of thematic content, resulting in three categories: polysemy and integrality polyphony, contribution of the notion of competence to comprehensiveness, and comprehensiveness as a permanent goal of care and teaching. The results indicate that medical students have difficulty conceptualizing comprehensiveness in its broader sense, limiting their understanding to the sense of “comprehensive care”; teachers also find it difficult to work comprehensively in their teaching. However, in courses with competency-oriented curricula, as recommended by the National Curricular Guidelines for the medical course, comprehensiveness is more prevalent in the theory-practice relationship; Finally, comprehensiveness is seen by the authors as a permanent search to guide the medical training since graduation. These results demonstrate that there is interest and concern in training medical professionals to meet the health needs of individuals and populations, based on a comprehensive, theoretical and practical understanding of comprehensiveness.