Reality and efforts of dental surgeons in community Dentistry

Abstract

This article concerns to the context of the Family Health Strategy of a large city in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, in order to discuss aspects of the reality of the oral health work process and the commitment of dental surgeons to ensure comprehensive individual and collective dental practices. It is a qualitative, exploratory-descriptive study, carried out with six dental surgeons through semi-structured interviews and adjusted thematic analysis. The results indicate a mismatch between the number of oral health teams, per registered population, absence of regulatory parameters and goals for the different dental-based clinics, and absence of structural alignment between the practices developed and the sociocultural reality of each territory. A great effort was identified by the collective of professionals in order to: a) take ownership of the Family Health Strategy (FHS) philosophy on a daily basis and/or expand it; b) recognize that is necessary to be willing to learn the public dimension of oral health in the act of doing it, because undergraduation is not always enough to ensure the appropriation of individual and collective oral health clinics; c) recognize the importance of becoming a creative and organic intellectual, who takes on a social rule; and d) overcome the effects generated in the practices due to the lack of political representation of the Family Health Strategy oral health. The guarantee of comprehensive dental practices is considered to be on the horizon, waiting for conditions of possibilities to make real what is still in the plan of autonomous efforts, of the institutional framework and of good intentions.