O trabalho do assistente social na atenção à saúde de crianças e adolescentes: demandas e respostas profissionais a partir dos Centros de Atenção Integral à Criança na cidade de Manaus

Abstract

The research proposed to analyze the work of social workers in the particularity of a space for health care for children and adolescents, with the general objective to "analyze the work of social workers in the health care of children and adolescents from Health Centers Comprehensive Child Care – CAICs, highlighting users' demands and forms of professional intervention, and specific objectives: to characterize the health care of children and adolescents in the city of Manaus through CAICs; to unveil the expressions of the social issue that are manifested in the socio-occupational space of the CAICs and that demand professional responses from social workers; know how the instrumentality of the social worker at work in CAICs is configured. The methodological process was carried out through qualitative and quantitative research, with data obtained through bibliographic, documental and field research, which was carried out through the application of an online questionnaire built on the Google Forms platform. The method adopted is the historical-dialectical materialism, considering the broad reading of reality and the apprehension of its multiple determinations. The research sites were 8 CAICs and the research subjects 10 social workers. The results refer us to a daily work in which professionals recognize the social issue as a product of social inequalities, but the appropriation as an object of professional intervention has occurred, in its majority, through the bias of institutional requests already instituted as answers to the service users, also pointing out that the planning of actions needs to contemplate the profile of users, although 100% of professionals admit knowing it through social interviews. Another result indicates that social needs require the construction of strategies that act on the substantive demands of users, as well as political-organizational actions towards the appropriation by professionals of social control instances and towards the mobilization of users. Other important aspects are expressed in the understanding of part of the professionals that there is a dichotomy between theory and practice and the fact that they reduce the instrumentality of professional work to the use of instruments and techniques.