Abstract
Cytopathology technicians are fundamental for cervical cancer screening, but there are gaps in their training. In this literature review, with a qualitative approach, carried out in the Virtual Health Library and in SciELO, without temporal clipping, we describe the history of public policies to combat cervical cancer, relating it to the history of technical professional education in cytopathology, analyzing the connections between such sequences of events. In a historical perspective, professional education in pathological anatomy was mainly through in-service training, but the field of technical training in cytopathology differs from this model. Various efforts have been made to structure curricula in the area and reduce discrepancies in this training. However, disputes between political and economic interests, marking the technical division of labor in the country, added to corporate clashes in the work on cytopathology, and the mismatch between education and screening actions prevented the effective materialization of these efforts. The demand for the incorporation of new technologies further accentuates the fragility in the formation of the category. Only with concrete government actions of training and professional regulation will it be possible to transform this scenario, favoring the development and expansion of campaigns for early detection of cancer in Brazil.
Keywords:
cervical cancer; cytopathology; professional education; history of public health; health policy