O processo de comunicação na atenção primária à saúde: cenário, potencialidades e desafios

Abstract

Interpersonal communication is an essential component for the practice of health professionals, especially in the area of primary health care. Adequate communication facilitates the construction of bonds and trust in professional-patient relationships, influences patient diagnosis, treatment and teaching process, aids in the connection and performance of the team, thus bringing an increase in satisfaction in health care and greater resolvability of cases. The objective of this work is to reflect on the potential of interpersonal communication in the practice of professionals working in primary health care, analyzing the positive aspects of the health communication process and identifying the most common barriers to its effectiveness. For this, a narrative review of literature was carried out, including 37 scientific articles collected in the LILACS, SCIELO and PUBMED databases, covering the publication period from 2009 to 2020. The keywords are: health communication; interprofessional communication; interprofessional education; collaborative practice; communication and skills; primary health care; interprofessional and practice. Articles that presented a complete abstract in the database, published in the years from 2009 to 2020, in the defined languages, whose object of study is of interest to this narrative review, and articles that contained the defined descriptors in their titles and/or abstracts, were included. Articles that did not present and did not discuss the strengths and weaknesses of communication in primary health care were excluded from the analysis and study. As a result, it was observed that interpersonal communication is an essential competence for health work, as it allows for an increase in the resolution of cases and facilitates teamwork, collaborating and expediting the delivery of comprehensive and humanized health care. The potential of communication had, as its main point, attention centered on the user. Lack of communication, failures in the process, exigencies and demands existing in health services that bureaucratize health care and determine the difficulty of maintaining dialogue between various professional categories, thus weakening interprofessional communication were identified as weaknesses.