Family health strategy: Contributions of health teams in the nutritional care of children

Abstract

The scope of this article is to evaluate the structure and work processes of Family Health Strategy teams related to the nutritional care of children. It involved an assessment survey of 136 health teams in 45 municipalities in the State of Paraíba. The data on structure (availability of an-thropometric equipment, supplements and technical documents) and processes (management, intersectoriality and activities of the Brazilian Breastfeeding and Feeding Strategy) were sum-marized in scores and classified as incipient, in-termediate or advanced. Analyses were performed according to contextual characteristics of the municipality (population size and human devel-opment) and the health team (whether from the Programa Mais Médicos or conventional teams, and whether accompanied by a nutritionist or not). Nutritional care was classified at the inter-mediate level, with the availability of technical documents, the use of SISVAN or the e-SUS and the implementation of the Brazilian Breastfeed-ing and Feeding Strategy being the most deficient items. Large municipalities and expanded health teams with nutritionists had better structure and process conditions, respectively. The fragmented implementation of nutritional care calls for improvements in structure and processes for due fit-ness for purpose.