Health-disease, biologicist or integral approach? Ethnography of medical education

Abstract

In the city of Bahía Blanca, the curricular design of the Medicine Degree is based on the consideration of the human being as a bio-psycho-socio-cultural unit. And its objective is to train medical professionals who are capable of approaching the health-disease-care process (PSEA) from an integral perspective that considers biological, psychological, social and cultural dimensions. Within the framework of an ongoing Research Group Project, we set out to investigate the ways in which the PSEA is built in learning spaces of hospital rotations that make up the Career Professional Development Cycle. In this work we present partial results of an ethnography carried out in such spaces, corresponding to the 4th and 5th years of the Medicine Degree. We emphasize the analysis of the way in which the notion of disease is constructed, taking into account the configuration of a health situation in a problem of medical resolution, and attributes of the situation selected during the definition of diagnoses and treatment plans. The field work was carried out in two stages, between 2018 and 2019, in two hospitals in the city of Bahía Blanca. It involved the observation, with different degrees of structuring and participation, of the dynamics of the resolution of clinical cases. The unit of analysis selected was the clinical case. While the unit of study referred to the learning encounter based on problem solving (ABRP) corresponding to each learning space in rotation through the services.