Inductors of change in the training of health personnel: pró-saúde and pet-saúde (pro-health and pet-health strategies

In the last decade, the training of health professionals has been redesigned in order to meet people’s health needs and not just their demands. Public policies on education and health promoted in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) and the Ministry of Health (Ministério da Saúde - MS) signaled for a curricular reform that is essential to graduate schools in health area(1,2).The milestone in the formalization of this change was the introduction of the National Curriculum Guidelines (Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais - DCN) for undergraduate programmes in the health field. All current instruments guide theconstruction of the graduates’ profile by means of an academic and professional model in which attitudes, skills and contents aim at a generalist, humanist, critical and reflective training, with competence in performance of all levels of health care,basing their conduct on scientific and ethical rigour(3-7).Not coincidentally, all documents point out the same fields of competence to be developed during the training of different professionals: health care, decision making, communication, leadership, lifelong education, administration and management (3-7), since health, being a complex field, is unable to perform resolving actions through a single discipline or area of knowledge.The proposal advocated by MEC and MS to produce transformation in the processes of training, working and expanding the service coverage has been accomplished through induction programmes, such as the Reorientation of Professional Training in Health National Programme (Pro-Health) and the Educationthrough Labour on Health Programme (PET-Health)(1,2).Pro-Health, which has been implemented in the country since 2005, through the disclosure of open announcements, wishes to tune healthcare education and social needs, considering historical, cultural and economic dimensions of the population(8). It encourages discarding the disease as the object of study and moving to focus on the attention to the individual. Its purpose is to train professionals whose profiles have become suitable to the local systems, and that implies promoting the abilities of learning, team work, communication, agility in the face of the situations, proactive and critical ability(9).Pro-Health provided financial inducements linked to partnerships between the State educational institutions and municipal health services. This partnership has led to adaptation of the facilities and provision of new