Dentists’ perception of teamwork in the Family Health Strategy: exploratory study.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate how dentists perceive their integration in family health teams and to elucidate the limits and possibilities of integration of this professional’s work processes. This is a descriptive and exploratory study of qualitative nature that used the semistructured interview as data collection procedure. The subjects of the research were six dentists who worked for at least six months in Family Health Units of a neighborhood in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The analysis of the interviews was based on the principles of content analysis proposed by Bardin. The result of the interviews’ analysis presented two thematic categories that were used to apprehend the aspects related to the insertion of dentists in the work process of the nuclear teams of the Family Health Strategy (FHS), which are: isolation of dentists by the ideation of their attachment to the dental chair and the organization of the dentist’s work in the FHS. This study showed that the dentists surveyed think that their work process is related to a model in which the user is still seen in a fragmentary way although the policy guidelines and the proposed models point in the opposite direction.