Introduction:

The medical education model in Brazil has been going through major changes in recent years. With the introduction of the “More Doctors” Program in 2013, which proposes to train human resources in the medical field to work preferentially in Brazil’s neediest regions under the reference of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), and the subsequent launching in the following year of the National Curriculum Guidelines for medical courses, a new reality was introduced regarding medical internship and the need for a mental health module. The emergence of new medical schools, as well as the lack of mental health internship programs in older schools, presupposes the necessity of reflection and viability of this new field of activity. This article aims at presenting the experience of the São Francisco University (USF) medical course in Bragança Paulista, which has been developing its mental health internship program for fifteen years.

Method:

As the structural premise, we established five guiding principles for the organization, planning and implementation of the internship program, respecting the specificity and reality of each course regarding the workload, faculty and learning scenarios.

Results:

It seeks to know about the programmatic content of mental health in medical courses, the internship structure, the existence of a mental health internship program of its own or related to a more comprehensive module, the existing workload, the number of students distributed among the modules, the number of faculty members and the learning scenarios.

Conclusion:

The authors present the operating model of the mental health internship program of the medical course at USF, in order to serve as a proposal of viability and guidance for medical courses that seek for a training referential. It is concluded that medical education, which faces an important moment of change-over, can train professionals who, even if they do not become psychiatrists, feel prepared for the mental health demands that can emerge during the healthcare routine and under the basic principles of SUS.

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