Abstract

SOUZA, Carlos Dornels Freire de et al. And the Past is a Garment that no Longer Suits us: Reflecting on Teaching-Health-Community Integration in a Medical Course in Northeast Brazil. Rev. Bras. Educ. Med. [online]. 2019, vol.43, n.1, suppl.1, pp.7-11. ISSN 1981-5271.  https://doi.org/10.1590/1981-5271v43suplemento1-editorial.

Both medical education and Brazilian society as a whole have undergone significant transformations in recent years. These changes seek to meet contemporary social and sanitary demands, especially with regard to a training focused on the local socio-sanitary reality. Medical training should therefore seek to develop skills, abilities and attitudes in a setting where teaching is integrated with health care and the community. The medical course of the Federal University of Alagoas, Arapiraca campus, was founded in 2015, resulting from the expansion of medical schools in Brazil and the internalization of the University’s actions. The course is structured on three axes (tutoring, medical skills and teaching-health-community integration). This text intends to present the work process of the Teaching-Health-Community Integration (LESC) axis, its main advances and the challenges involved in the training process. The mission of LESC is to place the academic into closer contact with the local socio-sanitary reality in order to ensure a medical training that offers comprehensive, respectful, ethical, critical and humanistic care, considering the subject and his or her context, culture, beliefs, habits and customs. To fulfill this mission, in 2017 the course curriculum was restructured so as to split the training into the basic cycle (1 st and 2 nd years), the intermediate cycle (3 rd and 4 th years) and, finally, medical internship (5 th and 6 th years). Our experience has shown that meaningful learning must come from practice, that is, from the process of experimentation with reality. Our students are distinctly more involved and interested when we include activities with well-defined practical purposes. Our work system involves monthly meetings, where major issues are discussed and strategies developed for conducting LESC, the standardization of course books and evaluation strategies, a continuing education program for teachers, as part of the biannual qualification plan and the inclusion of student-led evaluation during the semester. The variety of teaching strategies, all anchored in active learning methodologies, encourages greater involvement of our students in class. The main challenges can be summarised as consolidating student insertion into the local health care network and qualifying the teachers in their use of active methodologies in all learning processes.

Keywords : Medical Education; Flexible Learning; Curriculum; Higher Education.

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