The curricular internship in primary health care during the COVID-19 pandemic

challenges and reinventions for Dentistry education

Abstract

The Law Decree n. 6/2020 recognized the occurrence of public calamity due to COVID-19, which led to the interruption of in-person activities in higher education institutions. The aim of this report is to describe and analyze the experience of professors and undergraduate Dentistry students in curricular internships in Primary Health Care (PHC) during Emergency Distance Learning (EDL). This paper reports the experience of professors and monitors with three classes from the last but one semester of a daytime Dentistry course in the academic period between 2020/1 and 2021/2, adding up to 109 students. Institutional documents and professors' records on teaching activities were consulted. The method used was Systematization of Experiences. In August 2020, with the onset of EDL, the internship was reorganized, and the workload redistributed, preparing the students for later work at PHC. After January 2021, the internship, which faced challenges and reinventions, was developed in hybrid modality with practical experiences in Basic Health Units (UBS). Regarding the challenges, the training for virtual teaching is highlighted, as well as learning to deal with lost lives, the termination of contracts of UBS professionals, the restricted number of services to assist the accumulated classes and the expectation of clinical performance of students as opposed to the health restrictions. Concerning the reinventions, the most outstanding are filling and signing terms virtually and opening internship fields in countryside cities. The reconfigurations of internship aimed at the integration between theory and practice; besides the students' graduation, it enabled the acquisition of didactic-pedagogical framework for the development of professional skills.