Interprofessional communication and user participation in the Family Health Strategy

Abstract

This study focuses on the collaborative competencies for strengthening teamwork and interprofessional collaboration in Primary Health Care services, supported by the framework of the health work process, interprofessional work, and competencies. It aims to understand the conceptions and experiences of professionals of the Family Health Strategy teams about the core collaborative competencies: interprofessional communication and patient-centered care. This is a qualitative exploratory and interpretive study. A secondary database was used, with 34 interviews conducted with professionals from the teams of three health units located in two municipalities. Thematic content analysis was adopted, supported by WebQDA software. The results show the professionals’ understanding of the collaborative competencies as complementary and as impossible to being treated independently. Interprofessional communication is recognized as focus on meeting the user’s health needs, limited by unsatisfactory working conditions. The patient-centered care appears weakly, since the sense of user participation prevails as a transfer of responsibility for the user’s care to professionals in a minority way, as sharing the construction of the care plan.