THE TEACHING-LEARNING PROCESS OF FAMILY AND COMMUNITY MEDICINE COMPETENCIES IN A LONGITUDINAL INTERNSHIP
Medical education, Family medicine, Primary Health Care
With the promulgation of the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988 and the creation of the Unified Health System (SUS), an important movement has been observed to reorganize medical education, aiming to align the medical profile with the real needs of a universal, comprehensive, and equitable public health system, with primary care as its main strategic axis. Family and Community Medicine is the specialty of excellence for work in primary care and, given its defining characteristics, it plays an important role in reorienting medical education. The Multicampi School of Medical Sciences (EMCM), located in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte and committed to the principles of social accountability to guide medical education, invests in strategies for education within and for SUS, with a highlight being the structuring of a longitudinal internship: the Integrated Community Experience. This study aims to systematize the contents of Family and Community Medicine for the Integrated Community Experience modules. For this purpose, a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory research was conducted, utilizing documentary research and the researcher's involvement, under the thematic analysis framework. Four documents were analyzed for content analysis and systematization: "National Curriculum Guidelines for Medical Education" from 2014, the "Pedagogical Project of the EMCM Course," in its latest version from 2023, the "Guidelines for Teaching in Primary Health Care in Undergraduate Medicine" from 2012, and the "Competency-Based Curriculum for Family and Community Medicine" from 2014. The analysis resulted in three categories reflecting the institution's curriculum strategies for medical education in primary care: (1) The "morphology" of the EMCM curriculum from the perspective of the National Curriculum Guidelines, (2) the primary care training strategies in the EMCM curriculum, and (3) EMCM teaching through the lens of Family and Community Medicine. The analysis reveals a strong commitment of the institution to primary care-focused medical education and a strong alignment with the National Curriculum Guidelines for Medical Education from 2014. However, the field of Family and Community Medicine knowledge still remains underexplored in the curriculum. Ultimately, this research supports the development of a proposal for a Family and Community Medicine curriculum matrix for the VIC modules