Health promotion space in undergraduate Dentistry courses: (re)signifying knowledge and practices in the care production

Abstract

Health promotion requires that the health care practice transcends the normative concepts of Medicine in its clinical and/or public health expressions, and needs to be constructed and reconstructed in recognition of the reality of patients’ life experiences. Thus, the objective of this article is to report the experience of developing activities of health promotion and disease prevention in a shared space of the School of Clinical Dentistry of Christus University Center, from 2015 to 2017. The work groups were formed by teachers, students and patients who were assisted at the clinic. The actions carried out were agreed with the users in the first access to the clinic, when starting the patient care, within the framework of the proposal of shared construction of the care plan. Among the individuals studied are diabetes and hypertension, nutrition, women’s health, mental health, temporomandibular disorder, medicalization of life and self-medication, sexuality and sexually transmitted infections, oral lesions, postural pain, care and prevention of stroke, environment, sustainability, caries and periodontal disease. The Health Promotion Space as a methodological strategy developed in the undergraduate degree in Dentistry has provided a differentiated academic training in which students and teachers systematize planning, work as a team and promote creative, problematizing, participatory and interprofessional actions, experiencing intersubjective experience with collectives.