Better to talk about certain things: (de)politization at the first level of care in Bahía Blanca., Argentina

Abstract

This paper analyses the knowledge and practices that shape the work processes in the first level of care (PNA) in public health in the city of Bahía Blanca, understanding health as a political field. The objective is to deepen our understanding of the work processes in the production of health care, which reflect the ways in which everyday politics is constituted in the practices of subordination, resistance and links between workers and users. This work is guided by a qualitative interpretative design, based on the design of in-depth interviews with workers in various functions and participant observations with field recordings. The results allow us to identify that the field of health knowledge is in permanent dispute with the field of practices where, despite the evidence of reflective and integrative knowledge, the hegemony in practices continues to be linked to the biomedical model that depoliticises health and reduces it to fragmented and decontextualised individual elements. It is hoped that the findings will contribute to the generation of public policies aimed at improving the articulation between the social, the subjective and the biological in health care and management.