Analysis of the health promotion competencies from the official document and the speeches of the actors that implement the Health School Program in Federal District.

Abstract

Health promotion (HP) guides policies, practices in public health and redirect professional health education but its effective operationalization remains a challenge. Several studies point to the importance of defining, developing and utilizing the competences needed to improve and effectively work in HP.The present research evaluated the presence of the domains of competencies in HP (DCHP) in actors’ speeches about their practices and in the document that implement the Health School Program (PSE) in the Federal District (DF).It’s aqualitative research with individual semi-structured interviews (15 professionals and two implementing managers) and documental analyzes of the PSE/DF legal document. The reference methodology was the content analysis, using NVivo 8 software. The categories of analysis were defined a priori from the nine DCPS presented in the theoretical framework of the “CompHP” Project (favoring change, advocacy, partnership, communication, leadership, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation and research). The practices reported by actors expressed convergences, in different magnitudes, with eight DCPS; the domain “evaluation and research” was not identified. The document did not contain the domains “communication” and “advocacy”, and the “evaluation” exhibited partial convergence because it didn’t covered “research”. It is interesting to strengthen the DCPS as references in documents and practices of the PSE/DF. The “CompHP”, adapted to local contexts and capacities, can be used to optimize the development of these competences, to encourage building practices with the broader view of HP; and to support the design of assessment instruments for the PSE.