Reflections and proposals for the establishment of family and community medicine master’s programs in Brazil

Abstract

While Primary Health Care (PHC) and Family and Community Medicine (FCM) have expanded their space and relevance in heal-th care and undergraduate medical courses, Bra-zil has no stricto sensu FCM postgraduate pro-grams. In this paper, we analyze some aspects of the Brazilian public health field and the national stricto sensu postgraduate system that can help to explain this scenario. As a contribution to the debate on this topic, we also gathered information from international postgraduate and research ex-periences in FCM and devised a curriculum pro-posal for future national FCM master’s courses. In the end, we discussed some key strategies for the emergence of stricto sensu postgraduate cou-rses in this discipline in Brazil, highlighting the potential of these programs for evaluation and qualification of primary care services, especially the Family Health Strategy, and the training of PHC specialists required for the consolidation of the Unified Health System (SUS) as an accessible, comprehensive and equitable health system for the Brazilian population.