Critical perspective of social participation in health surveillance

Abstract

Many barriers impede the defense of health equity, especially those that hinder social participation in health. In the mid-1990s, Victor Valla proposed incorporating the population's participation into health surveillance through Paulo Freire's popular education. This counterpoint to traditional surveillance practices, then called civil health surveillance, is added to the expanded concept of health, and has a strong connection with the critical perspective of epidemiology to understand the dialectical relationship between social classes and their lived spaces. The practice of civil surveillance aims to overcome essential gaps left by traditional methods of public health investigation. It includes a lack of attention to socio-cultural contexts, the construction of risk located only in the individual, and the representation of public health agendas that privilege and pathologize certain behaviors. In this sense, this paper discusses concept of civil health surveillance, the locus of discussion of population studies in the reification of the role of the contextual effect in explaining the social production of health and the incorporation of popular participation in health surveillance as an element of social transformation. The deepening of this discussion allows a participatory construction of new health models focused on the effective reduction of health inequities and, consequently, the effective universalization of the right to health.