Violence against women and Brazilian health care policies: a proposal for integrated care in primary care services.

Describes a counseling and support intervention in primary health care which is being piloted in a health center in São Paulo, Brazil. This proposal integrates sexual and domestic violence assistance and hospital and primary care, providing comprehensive care and intersectorial response for women.

[Qualitative research in health: methodological reflections on the oral report and narrative production in a study about the medical profession]. / Pesquisa qualitativa em saúde: reflexões metodológicas do relato oral e produção de narrativas em estudo sobre a profissão médica.

Qualitative research as applied to Public Health and Social Medicine is studied. The project is based upon research into the historical transformation of medical professional autonomy as medicine shifted from the "liberal" practice to recent "technological" medicine. Field research used unstructured recorded interviews to gather personal testimonies about the professional histories of physicians who graduated between 1930 and 1955. These testimonies are technically classified as "oral accounts" and were registered as free narratives. This study analysis how accounts can express the physicians' self-representations of their daily work and simultaneously write the history of medical practice. Further, the unstructured interview is evaluated as an instrument yielding free narratives and life accounts.

[Work in medicine: some issues concerning professional autonomy]. / O trabalho médico: questões acerca da autonomia profissional.

The author analyzes several issues pertaining to medical practice as related to the technical autonomy characterizing professional activity in this field. She points to the coexistente of a scientific side and an empirical/pragmatic side of medicine, the latter known as the medical art. The article also discusses the complexity of medical command of technological rationality which presides over the practical use of scientific knowledge. The author defines work in medicine as a "tensive structure" and examines its consequences for self-representation by physicians, their daily work, and themselves as agents of professional labor and subjects of action.

[Autonomy and work in medicine]. / A autonomia e o trabalho em medicina.

We discuss autonomy in medical work as resulting from two basic moments: as social work consuming and producing goods and services, reproducing the dominant mode of production and its ethical foundations; and as a service in which autonomy, limited as social work, expresses some attributes acquired by medical work (technical independence and self-regulation) as a result of the monopoly in the use of science to deal with individually perceived health-related needs. These moments are expressed in the doctor-patient relationship, which makes uncertainties surrounding that relationship more evident. From this understanding about medical work and its autonomous condition, we discuss some theoretical concepts related to the study of labor and/or services in contemporary society and which provide us with an epistemological basis for more adequate approaches to scientific research concerning that object.