Introduction:

Social participation in the practice of health-promoting actions is one of the guidelines of the Unified Health System (SUS). From this comes Functional Health Literacy (LFS), which is understood as the individual’s ability to understand, interpret and apply written or spoken information about health. In this context, the university community outreach program comes to represent a strategy that transmits information about health prevention and allows user empowerment.

Objective:

To report the experience of a community outreach project that works by enabling interaction between academics and primary care users in order to stimulate LFS and assess the users’ views on the actions developed by students.

Method:

The project’s interventions prioritized themes and diseases prevalent in the local population and/or feature in the Ministry of Health’s national awareness calendar. At the end of the interventions, role plays were performed to simulate real life situations, where some users were invited to participate and, hence, stimulate LFS. Furthermore, the users’ views on the students’ participation were assessed through an interview using a guiding question followed by the application of Bardin’s method of content analysis.

Result:

During the project, the interventions produced noticeably satisfactory results in relation to the content, as the users presented several questions and accounts of experiences. It was noteworthy how constructive the educational practices were in the context of LFS stimulation, as they provided for the active participation of individuals. In addition, the users’ positive reports corroborated the students’ perception of the actions. Users addressed justifications such as lack of actions in health education, lack of information about the health-disease process, the importance of prevention and exchange of knowledge.

Conclusion:

Through the users’ accounts and the authors’ experience, the conclusion can be drawn that health education actions always developed to place the user as the protagonist of their own health enable an exchange of knowledge between academics and the community, promoting the multiplication of knowledge about the topics covered in the project.

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