Community health workers: bioethic and legal aspects of living labour

Abstract

Community health agents – who make up the Family Health Strategy team – are workers who live in the community and conduct health promotion and education actions, by means of home visits to families within the territory where they work. This article presents a review of the historical and legal framework of this professional category and its insertion into the world of living work. We discuss, in the light of relevant literature, the desirable conditions for the agent's education given the diversity of relations established by these professionals to families, having in mind the problems that arise within care action, such as diseases, unemployment, poverty, licit and illicit drug use/abuse, risk due to direct and indirect contact to people living in illegality, among others. From this perspective, bioethics may be proposed as a key knowledge regarding the composition of a minimum toolbox, able to provide the community health agent with tools to identify and cope with the ethical problems emerging from the space-time of Family Health Strategy.