Bioethics of the care in the teaching clinic: learning with patients

Abstract

The study aimed to understand welcoming patients practices in a dentistry teaching clinic. It is a holistic single-case study with a qualitative approach. Twenty patients were interviewed following an open-ended script containing problematizing topics trying to connect bioethical principles to subjective devices of care: expanded concept of health and illness, intersubjectivity, co-responsibility, and quality of life. The discursive practices analyzed showed that the bond between students and patients of the teaching clinic is established in a construction mediated by the long training time. Co-responsibility is related with the intersubjective constructions in the care, being the actors of the process both the students and the patients. When claiming to feel free to give an opinion on their treatment, they also express a position of reduced autonomy, as they consider that it is not necessary to give it. As a reflection of the fragmentation of the care in the teaching clinics, much silencing emerges from these relations of power and care. It is believed that that the importance of practices that unlink themselves from strictly technical functions and invest in the speaking and listening processes is clear. In an untiring search for empathy and bond as the most powerful health technologies for the treatment, they reaffirm the autonomy of the people in the construction of their itineraries of care and human dignity as a core value of the practice of health.