SUS in the media in a pandemic context

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced new demands for services in healthcare systems around the world. In Brazil, the SUS became the object of interest of the media, which made efforts to cover government actions and the system’s capacity to control the pandemic. This study aims to analyze articles from the newspaper ‘Folha de São Paulo’ (FSP), regarding the meanings produced about the Unified Health System (SUS) in the COVID-19 pandemic. 231 articles were analyzed, among the 524 published in the period from January to May 2020, following the established inclusion criteria. The corpus was categorized in four senses: constitutional SUS, problem SUS, disputed SUS and active SUS. The reflection on the diversity of meanings attributed to the SUS points to the need to expand the capture of the dimensions of the SUS.