Entre a formação e o trabalho: um olhar jurídico sobre as dinâmicas laborais nos programas de residência uni e multiprofissional em saúde no Ceará

Abstract

This study examines Uni- and Multiprofessional Health Residency programs as experiences shaped by structural tensions between education and work, focusing on the fields of Nursing, Pharmacy, and Dentistry in the state of Ceará, Brazil. Although formally defined as lato sensu postgraduate specialization programs, these residencies operate in practice within a context of intensive service delivery, where educational activities and productive demands continuously overlap in the daily operations of the Unified Health System. The study employs a primarily qualitative methodological approach, supplemented by descriptive quantitative procedures, in order to capture the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon under investigation. As such, the research is situated within contemporary debates on the precarization of health labor and hybrid forms of professional integration that challenge traditional legal and institutional classifications. Critical scholarship in Labor Law and the Social Sciences has emphasized that such arrangements often generate zones of legal indeterminacy, in which individuals in training assume work-related responsibilities without corresponding labor protections. Within this context, multiprofessional residency emerges as a paradoxical institutional space: indispensable to public health policy, yet permeated by structural and regulatory weaknesses that directly affect residents’ working and learning conditions. This study concludes that strengthening uni- and multiprofessional residency as a strategy for health workforce training requires addressing these contradictions through the development of a model that more effectively balances the pedagogical objectives of in-service education with adequate social protection, dignity, and the health of professionals in training, while acknowledging the central role these individuals play in sustaining the daily functioning of the public health system.