Abstract
The Extended Family Health and Primary Care Center (Núcleo Ampliado de Saúde da Família e Atenção Básica - NASF-AB) was created in Brazil to support and expand Family Health care and management. Its performance regarding workers’ health and health and environment in rural and water territories is analyzed with families that live from artisanal fishing and peasant agriculture. This is a qualitative research that was anchored in references from the Sociology of Absences and Collective Health, in the latter’s particular approach to the relations between health, environment, and work. The research used focus groups to produce narratives of professionals from the Extended Center for Family Health and Primary Care in municipalities in the semiarid and coastal regions of the Northeast. The socioeconomic and cultural singularities of the rural and water populations were evidenced; invisibilities and potentialities about their ways of life and work; work-related burdens and diseases; and aspects of the performance of the Extended Family Health Center and Primary Care through interactions with work and the environment in these territories. The care offered to these populations partially considers their sociocultural, productive, environmental, and health specificities, and it is necessary to expand the recognition of their ways of life and work, aiming at more successful interventions on health problems and needs; which poses challenges to health education for the Unified Health System.
Keywords:
primary health care; family health strategy; rural population health; worker health; health and environment