Supervised curricular internship

the Unified Health System in the center of the process

Abstract

The mandatory curricular internship developed by the dental programs is the most important element to the effectuation of the Unified Health System (SUS) as dental surgeons’ training organizer. This study aims to deepen the reflection on the source of the limitations to SUS internship development and the role of the different institutions and actors in such difficulties. It also seeks to evaluate limitations and challenges imposed on this educational orientation, considering the market dentistry’s hegemony in the training, which comes about in the central pedagogical role assigned to the individual dental procedure at the expense of what collective oral health professes. This is a theoretical essay, in which advances are identified by placing the SUS as an essential internship field for professional training, analyzed by the light of the Federal Constitution, the National Curriculum Guidelines for undergraduate courses in Dentistry and initiatives launched by Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health. The analysis recognizes the curricular internship as a potentially structuring element of SUS and identifies factors that favors it and opposes it within SUS itself, in Academia and in business movements. To that effect, it must consummate partnership with public health services, contribute with planning and management of its activities, provide training to preceptors and auxiliar people involved, and articulation with the social control. All teachers should be internships’ strategic actors since their permanent association to an action or service by SUS in their different degrees of complexity, regardless the curricular components to which they are associated. This challenge transcends the traditional processes of training since to such achievement, more than the pedagogical strategies, it is necessary that the Brazilian State effectively play its role in strengthening SUS.