Professionals as network producers: compositions and connections in health care

Abstract

This article presents partial results of an intervention research performed in basic health units and seeks to problematize health care networks. Following daily paths of users, selected teams from services, it was asked how and when networks become more powerful and produce health or, on the contrary, when they weaken themselves. Health care networks are broad and operationalized in different ways. They articulate multiple vectors consisting of formal and informal, visible and invisible, objective and subjective elements that contribute to facilitate or to hinder the construction of points of articulation between services, people and resources to health care. Considering professionals as network producers, we discuss the tensions between ordering and hierarchical systems and the perspective of a rhizomatic network, the routing flows and the movements that the different actors involved perform to produce the care network. Bringing to the center the users, their rights and the limits and potentialities of their social places, we could see weaknesses in the production of care, in the composition of the networks and in the promotion of health. Also, it turns out that resources and connections are reinvented in the daily encounter between institutions and subjects, which affect each other and can support the practices of network care.