A Humanização do SUS como uma política do comum

Abstract

Humanization of SUS as a common policy This supplement of Interface-Comunicação, Saúde, Educação results from combined efforts within the National Humanization Policy (PNH) to systematize and socialize reflections around the topic of healthcare humanization, and notably the production achieved from the seminar "Humanization of SUS under debate", held in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, on June 25-26, 2008. This dialogue, in the form of policy options and methods of including subjects and groups, imprints changes on PNH, with ongoing changes through bringing in and incorporating new elements. Inclusion cannot just be fashionable discourse, and the challenge is to affirm this as practical policy. For this reason, over the five years of PNH existence, the conviction remains that public policies are not constructed and strengthened without including subjects, both plurally and singularly. This issue of Interface, which is plural and heterogenous, reflects the inclusion process. SUS, as an ethical-political precept, is an instrument for the struggle within healthcare against authoritarianism and practices that take over lives within contemporary capitalism. Moving this struggle forward through institutional democratization of healthcare production practices requires commitment from the different players involved in this process. Hence, it is important to put workers, managers and users side by side at the time of planning, implementing and evaluating healthcare practices. SUS, as a public healthcare policy, seeks to ensure the right to healthcare. We believe that this public policy should not be confused with government policy. On the other hand, we are fighting for it to be a policy taken on by the state, given that perhaps there will thus be some possibility that it will continue to exist even if not as government policy. This is the dilemma: we want it to be public because we want to strengthen it at a collective (common) level, but we do not want the state and governments to become the sole expression of the collective level, which would signify privatization of policies. We have gone through this debate-not only a conceptual-political discussion but also a "way of debating among ourselves while trying not to drown"-by seeking to institutionalize the humanization policy of SUS while also seeking to escape from institutionalization that might leave us drained through the instituting forces. We reaffirm that the PNH is a policy for horizontalization, since it argues against the practices of verticalization and fragmentation. Thus, its principles, i.e. its horizontal nature, continually provide arguments for diminishing the risk of its own institutionalization. This supplement forms part of this movement and its ethical-political choices: a space both for presentation and affirmation and for argumentation, thus giving rise to reflection and repositioning. It is an instrument for analyzing and affirming the humanization policy as a strategy for improving our civilizing experience within healthcare. Some papers, commissione...