Atuação do cirurgião-dentista no Programa Saúde na Escola no município de Fortaleza-CE

Abstract

The School Health Program (SHP), a partnership between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, was established in 2007 with an aim to contribute to the integral formation of students through actions of promotion, prevention and health care. Traditionally, dentists develop actions to prevent oral diseases at schools, therefore they are integrated in the school environment. The purpose of this study was to describe the activities of dentists from the Family Health Strategy in the School Health Program in Fortaleza, outlining socio-demographic and professional aspects of these professionals’ profiles, identifying the actions developed in their practice under the program, their facilities and difficulties in conducting the work and their training needs. This is a cross-sectional descriptive study, with a predominantly quantitative approach, developed with 158 dentists from Fortaleza’s Family Health teams associated with public elementary and/or high schools through the SHP. An online questionnaire with subjective and objective questions was the data collection instrument proposed for this study. Quantitative data were analyzed by the statistical package SPSS and presented in charts and tables. The data collected from the subjective questions underwent content analysis and are presented in tables. The results showed that 48.1% of the participants were unaware of the connection between their team and the SHP, and that 55.7% of them work in the program, but only 25.3% do it frequently. The majority of these professionals never participated in program trainings, but it was detected interest in this kind of training, especially in those regarding educative strategies. The actions developed by the participants on the SHP are, essentially, to prevent oral diseases, however, a significant number of dentists also participate in health promotion actions with other approaches. The main facilitator factor in conducting the program was the school support and the main difficulties were the problems with transportation and material supply. The training of professionals involved in the SHP was the most pointed out suggestion. As a conclusion, even though structural factors still jeopardize its development, the SHP endures in Fortaleza and relies on the important, although still limited, participation of dentists as health promoters at schools.