A construção identitária dos gestores municipais de saúde da microrregião de Juiz de Fora, Lima Duarte e Bom Jardim de Minas

Abstract

With the Federal Constitution of 1988, health became a right of all and duty of the State. The Unified Health System was instituted with the decentralization of management to the municipality as one of its organizational principles, which highlighted the municipal health manager. For the planning, execution and monitoring of organizational activities and policies, both in the public and private spheres, one has the figure of the manager. In the specific case of health, the municipal secretary suffers from economic, bureaucratic and political pressures. The managerial work is thematic in the area of organizational studies, whose focus was mostly on the understanding of roles, functions, tasks and behavior, being little explored, such as subjectivity, complexity and the dilemmas of function. In the bulge of this discussion, the question of the identity of these subjects emerges. By definition, identity is constructed and reconstructed throughout life, based on the social relations established in the various groups that we are part of, including that of work, the focus of this study. Thus, the central objective was to describe how the municipal health managers construct their managerial identity. The research was carried out in the micro-region of Juiz de Fora, Lima Duarte and Bom Jardim de Minas, using the qualitative methodology, based on semi-structured interviews with the three municipal health managers, the three municipal health councilors, users and the representative of the Public Prosecutor's Office in the region. To analyze the data, we used content analysis, establishing categories based on the discourses and the theoretical reference. The results show that managers need to deal with SUS contingency and underfunding, in addition to interference from the judiciary, which disorganizes the planning and day-to-day work of the secretariats. On the other hand, they feel fulfilled when they reach the goal of helping users in their diverse health demands. The social actors interviewed highlighted some attributes of the municipal health manager, such as "technical being", "fire extinguisher", "bureaucrat", among others, that were extracted to understand this managerial identity from two axes to which refers to Dubar (2005): real social identity and virtual social identity. In spite of the interviewees' attempt to show distancing from the attribute "being political" in the exercise of the function, since there is a need to be in constant negotiation with the various social actors, it is necessary to demystify the idea of public managers endowed with only a rationality but rather to consider the clear political dimension of the function.