Abstract

CARVALHO, Amâncio António de Sousa  and  CARVALHO, Graça Simões de. Training effect in the conceptions of Health and Health Promotion of university students. Rev. Port. Sau. Pub. [online]. 2010, vol.28, n.2, pp.161-170. ISSN 0870-9025.

Introduction: The students' conceptions are very complex and depend on the history of life of each person, of his culture and of his social representations, being connected to the knowledge, to the values system and to the social practices ¹. In turn, the practices of Health Education express the conceptions of those who develop and are influenced by them. From here we concluded that the conceptions of Health Promotion and Health Education are very important. Material and methods: Therefore, the general purpose of the present study was to compare the values system in Promotion and Health Education transmitted in courses in the health area, preschool teaching, basic teaching and social service, in order to understand the relation between the conceptions to be taught and the taught conceptions. For such we developed a cross-sectional, comparative, and descriptive study, which sample was constituted by 709 students (63 % of the universe of the students) of seven university courses, being four courses in the scope of health (Medicine, Nursing of Braga, O' Porto and Vila Real), two in the scope of education (Infancy Educators and Teachers of the 1st Cycle of Basic Education) and one course in the Social Service area. We applied an auto-filling questionnaire to the students of the 1st and of the 4th year of the referred courses. Results: The five more used keywords by the total of the sample for referring the health concept were the following (by decreasing order): "Well-Being", "Hospital", "Disease", "Doctors" and "Nurses", being the first one used by 77.4 % of the students. The predominance of these keywords can be connected to a reductionist vision of the determinants of health, centred in the system of health, excluding the others determinants of health. It was in the Braga Nursing Course (BR-N) that we verified a higher reduction in the keywords connected to the reductionist vision of the Health term, between the 1st and the 4th year; similarly, the course of Basic Teaching Teachers (BTT) was where there were a bigger increase associated to the wide concept of Health, between the 1st and the 4th year. In contrast, the Vila Real Nursing Course (VR-N), did not show substantial changes on the perspective of Health from the 1st to the 4th year, since both have a technical-centric view of health. Of the total students' sample, 86 % gave more importance to the positive perspective of Health, 91 % and 65 % elected the wide perspective of School Health and Health Promotion, respectively. The majority of the students considered that the terms Health Promotion and Health Education are different concepts, although they couldn't distinguish them verbally. Conclusions: Of the results obtained emerged a set of conclusions and recommendations that constitute the outcome of the present article.

Keywords : Well-Being; Health; Health Promotion; Health Education.

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