Health promotion and working in/with groups: An experience of interprofessional training at UNIFESP Baixada Santista (Brazil)

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the experience of the Teamwork and Collective Practices module developed by a group of students of Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (Baixada Santista campus). This experience was produced through dialogue between the teaching-learning process in health promotion and the challenges posed by interprofessional education in undergraduate courses of health occupations: psychology, social service, physical education, occupational therapy, nutrition, and physiotherapy. The experience entailed the use of dialogic methods in the conduction of the teaching-learning process involving students, technicians, staff members, and users of different public healthcare and community services. The objective is health promotion and is founded on hearing the needs of groups, the discussion of participatory strategies for students of different courses, and the formation of encounter groups directed toward a plan of action. The challenges of interprofessional collaboration include the identification of actions that are common to the different fields involved and a method that ensures the quality of the experience at the meetings between the students and groups. The students are supervised in small groups by a faculty member in the planning of the proposed activities and the presentation of written reports (denominated "field journals"). Continual evaluations occur during the semester, which ends with collective work by the students encompassing different aspects of the encounters. The experience has been evaluated positively by the both the community services and students.